When Obama Administration Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra started his keynote at today’s Health 2.0 Conference in San Francisco, he began by mentioning the work that I did when the two of us were at the Advisory Board Company (that’s him there pointing to me), where I first began experimenting with the concept of information prescriptions. That came out of a two-year project (1999-2001) where we developed in-depth consumer health content. Just as (or maybe more) importantly, we shadowed patients and clinicians in hospitals and clinics and conducted dozens of structured interviews with people with diabetes (and their families).

The first panel that followed Chopra, I saw some cool tools demo-ed, but I didn’t get a sense of whether they truly support patient-centered care and meet consumers’ real health needs. After the panel on “Clinical Groupware and the Next Generation of Clinician-Patient Interaction Tools,” I asked the question:

“How did you collect information from consumers in advance of developing your applications? Did you do focus groups, structured interviews, or direct ethnographic observation to understand what tasks consumers really want to accomplish? And, at what point in the development process, did you do that critical research?”

Only one of the panelists chose to respond to the question (I think it was Arien Malec, VP, Product Management, Relay Health, but I’m not sure). His answer was somewhat vague (compared to my rather specific question), with the exception of discussing how they incorporate user feedback they receive after the deployment of tools. Although I agree that user feedback (a core part of the Health 2.0 model) is invaluable for refining tools, it is a fundamentally different part of the research & development arsenal.  And, more to the point, it was not an answer to my question.

So, when (following an excellent “The Patient Is In” session) I moderated the “Search & Content” session that featured six different Health 2.0 demos, I decided to keep asking the question until I got an answer that satisfies me. After all, the main reason that I could see for creating a panel with the diversity of demos covering all of search and content was because they basically address how we can help consumers get the right information at the right time to meet their decision-making and health management needs (basically colloquial for information therapy).  I figured that I might get a better answer if I re-framed the question:

“What did you do in advance of building your technology to ensure that what you were building met specific consumer needs?”

I admit it was a loaded question in that I have a strong bias. Before investing millions of dollars in product development, I believe that — if the goal is to develop consumer-centric tools — every company should begin with some combination of these patient-centered research approaches:

• Consumer surveys
• Focus groups with patients and families/caregivers
• Structured, extensive interviews with consumers
• Shadowing of patients and clinicians
• Direct, ethnographic observations of consumers in the settings where they “do” most of their health care (e.g., their homes, workplaces, schools, etc.)

If we want to meet Chopra’s call for robust innovation that transforms our economy and the health care delivery system, we first need to identify the health tasks that consumers want to accomplish. The best way to figure that out is to get answers directly from consumers before we write a single line of programming code.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 7th, 2009 at 12:25 am and is filed under Engaging Consumers, Health 2.0 Space, Innovation, Inside the Beltway. 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.