Bristish IxAction Alliance member, the Patient Information Forum (PiF), has just released a report, “Information: First Line Therapy?” (overview available here). Among PiF’s main conclusions:

1. Whenever possible, information should be the first therapy prescribed.
2. Information therapy (Ix) needs to be personalized and targeted to the “correct stage of the patient journey.”
3. Because of the vast information available and that the fact that much of it is “incorrect or misleading…there is a definite need for a more stringent monitoring system, condensing information and/or signposting information to direct professionals and patients to the most suitable resource.” They’re not sure how to operationalize this recommendation.

Based on these findings, PiF has identified a series of next steps — some of which are:

1. PiF wants to develop a bigger research base in three areas: a) “how information can be integrated into routine theerapuetic management;” b) “measure the impact of health information;” and c) assess the current state of “health information provision.”
2. PiF plans to become a more forceful public policy advocate in this arena in the UK.
3. PiF recognizes that it needs to “find ways to help the consumer health information workforce develop in their roles, increase their skills and share their knowledge and experiences more widely and effectively.”

The Center for Information Therapy (IxCenter) has answered some of the research questions in our white papers.

• “The Mysterious Maze of the World Wide Web: What Makes Internet Health Information High Quality?” evaluates the quality of diabetes content on the Web and — based on empirical research and scientifically validated tool development — provides a series of policy and operational recommendations for advancing more robust measurement of information quality.
• “The Ix Evidence Base: Using Information Therapy to Cross the Quality Chasm” synthesizes the empirical evidence in support of Ix interventions and organizes them around the Institute of Medicine’s 10 health care delivery redesign recommendations from its “Crossing the Quality Chasm” report.

The IxCenter also has conducted other relevant research to answer these questions that fall into two categories (both of which are accessible to IxAction Alliance members through our member portal):

1. Ongoing review of the peer-reviewed literature. Through our bimonthly IxResearch Briefings, we have added about 40 more studies to the original “Ix Evidence Base” white paper, each of which describes implications for implementation of initiatives focused on proactive and targeted delivery of information to consumers/patients.
2. We have also collected more than 40 IxInsights reports and associated archived webinars on a wide array of innovations or best practices in the field. Although many of these interventions were implemented without a prospective study design, they still offer critical learnings about the best Ix implementation strategies.

As I have alluded to before, Ix Pioneer Sponsor Group Health Cooperative has provided a seed grant to help us develop a database that rigorously and methodically integrates these two types of evidence. By doing so, we will be able to answer the questions posed by PiF (and others) more robustly.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 19th, 2009 at 11:00 am and is filed under International Ix, Ix Definitions, Research, Standards Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.