I’ll probably blog about multiple items that arose from our excellent first PCHIT Advisory Group meeting. One of the important issues that we discussed was: To what extent can we engage the consumers/patients in the solution development process? As we go on site, these are some of the ways we will explore engaging consumers.

• Encouraging and/or facilitating periodic meetings of clinicians with their patients.
• Shadowing consumers throughout parts of their day outside the traditional health care delivery system.
• Attending the community advisory boards that all federaly qualified health centers are required to have.
• Starting or encouraging patient blogs or other online social networking opportunities for the people served by these practices.

We will need to be careful that we recognize the limitations of each approach. For example, with the first bullet, this could lead to a self-selected group (e.g., who has time for such things?), but that can be mitigated somewhat by encouraging the practice to offer child care, transportation, etc.

We’ll be interested to hear from our site partners what they think of these ideas.

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