The Center for Information Therapy has been working with the HHS Office of Disease Prevention & Health Promotion to help create more robust e-health and health communication objectives for Healthy People 2020 (see related post for background). There is considerable interest now in the development of a new objective related to information prescribing.

The public input is critically important to advancing these objectives, so please voice your own opinion on the proposed new information prescribing objective. All you need to do is go here, log in, click on the “Discussions” tab on the left nav bar, and click on the “Information therapy and related issues” thread.

Here’s the substance of the argument:

Proposed New Healthy People 2020 Objective

Ensure that each encounter with the delivery system is accompanied by prescribed information that supports an individual’s personalized health needs. 

 Various operational definitions of prescribed health guidance are practical. In order to ensure that the definition incorporates a wide array of strategies, media, and tools to meet the diverse needs of the U.S. population, it is important that the definition balances specificity of purpose with flexibility for varying approaches.

One multi-stakeholder coalition of information prescribing experts developed the following definition, which has subsequently been adopted by various non-profit oversight entities (see “Justification” section).

To be classified as information therapy, information should meet each of the following requirements:

·         Be targeted to one or more of the individual’s current moments in care.

·         Be proactively provided/prescribed to the individual.

·         Support one or more of the following:

o   Informed decision making, and/or

o   Skill building and motivation for effective self-care and healthy behaviors related to the moment in care, and/or

o   Patient comfort/acceptance.

·         Be tailored to an individual’s specific needs and/or characteristics, including their health literacy and numeracy levels.

·         Be accurate, comprehensive, and easy to use.

  Justification for New Objective

Research demonstrates that 40% to 80% of all information communicated orally by a physician during an in-person clinical encounter is forgotten by the patient by the time he or she returns home. Ample peer-reviewed literature exists to support the impact of information prescribing and much of it is summarized in the white paper, “The Ix Evidence Base: Using Information Therapy to Cross the Quality Chasm.” In addition, the Center for Information Therapy has many additional references available.

Some independent, non-profit, private sector oversight groups have begun to build information prescriptions into their expectations for care management.

·         The accreditation organization, URAC, announced in August 2008 that organizations seeking disease management accreditation would be subject to “information therapy” standards.

·         The National Business Coalition on Health (NBCH) revised its eValue8 common RFI for health plans to expand its consumer engagement criteria to include information therapy components.

 Potential Data Source

1) Current assessment of information prescribing relies on structural measures of information prescribing:

a.    URAC began collecting data in 2009 on information prescribing, according to detailed specifications of what constitutes an information therapy intervention.

b.    NBCH will collect data from hundreds of health plans in 2009 (using similar specifications) about their provision of information therapy to their members in order to facilitate better consumer engagement.

2)    Significant interest exists among varied parties in stimulating the development of performance measures that assess information prescribing and related outcomes of it.

a.    The independent, not-for-profit, Center for Information Therapy is exploring measure development in this area.

b.    The National Quality Forum and the associated National Priorities Partnership has identified patient-centered measurement as a critical priority. This work may build on measures of patient activation, behavior change, decision quality, and consumer engagement.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 30th, 2009 at 5:58 am and is filed under Healthy People 2020, Inside the Beltway, Ix Definitions, Participatory Medicine, Performance Measurement, 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.