Medical Informatics

Information technology has been revolutionizing the everyday life of the common man, while medical science has been making rapid strides in understanding disease mechanisms, developing diagnostic techniques and effecting successful treatment regimen, even for those cases which would have been classified as a poor prognosis a decade earlier. The confluence of information technology and biomedicine has brought into its ambit additional dimensions of computerized databases for patient conditions, revolutionizing the way health care and patient information is recorded, processed, interpreted and utilized for improving the quality of life. This book consists of seven chapters dealing with the three primary issues of medical information acquisition from a patient's and health care professional's perspective, translational approaches from a researcher's point of view, and finally the application potential as required by the clinicians/physician. The book covers modern issues in Information Technology, Bioinformatics Methods and Clinical Applications. The chapters describe the basic process of acquisition of information in a health system, recent technological developments in biomedicine and the realistic evaluation of medical informatics

USING GROUNDED THEORY TO DEFINE PATIENT ENGAGEEMNT FROM THE PATIENT’S PERSPECTIVE

Patient engagement has been found to lead to significant improvements in patient health, reduced costs, and improved patient experiences and has been the focus of healthcare research and policy change for over two decades as healthcare researchers, providers, and agencies strive to capitalize on its powerful effects. Initially, definitions and theories regarding what patient engagement is, how it works, and why it is important were generated from the perspective of healthcare providers and researchers, often missing what patients themselves thought about their own healthcare engagement. Even after researchers began to focus more on the patient perspective, most research has included patients who are already highly engaged in healthcare. This dissertation seeks to expand past research by adding the perspective of patients who vary in how often they use healthcare services and how engaged they feel. This dissertation is comprised of the following seven chapters: (a) an introduction to the dissertation, (b) a systematic review examining the effectiveness of patient education through PHRs on patient engagement and health outcomes, (c) a literature review that outlines how theories and definitions of patient engagement developed, (d) a proposed methodology for the original research study, (e) an original research study using grounded theory to define patient engagement from the perspective of a wide range of patients, (f) a discussion of implications for researchers, healthcare providers, and patients regarding patient engagement