Consumer Health Informatics: Empowering Healthy-Lifestyle-Seekers Through mHealth

People are at risk from noncommunicable diseases (NCD) and poor health habits, with interventions like medications and surgery carrying further risk of adverse effects. This paper addresses ways people are increasingly moving to healthy living medicine (HLM) to mitigate such health threats. HLM-seekers increasingly leverage mobile technologies that enable control of personal health information, collaboration with clinicians/other agents to establish healthy living practices. For example, outcomes from consumer health informatics research include empowering users to take charge of their health through active participation in decision-making about healthcare delivery. Because the success of health technology depends on its alignment/integration with a person's sociotechnical system, we introduce SEIPS 2.0 as a useful conceptual model and analytic tool. SEIPS 2.0 approaches human work (i.e., life's effortful activities) within the complexity of the design and implementation of mHealth technologies and their potential to emerge as consumer-facing NLM products that support NCDs like diabetes

Redesigning the Use of Electronic Health Records in the Exam Room: A Multidisciplinary Approach

Utilizing video-recordings and transcriptions of actual clinical interactions, as well as interviews with patients and physicians, this thesis analyzes how the use of electronic health records, and the information found within them, impact doctor-patient interaction and, in effect, notions of patient-centered care. ‘Patient centered care,’ a major area of focus in doctor-patient communication literature, is a style of interaction where the patient is put first and their concerns and feelings are given priority over the ‘biomedical agenda’ by the doctor. Using a multidisciplinary approach between language and social interaction and industrial and interaction design, this thesis proposes possible changes to electronic health records and exam rooms and, more importantly, how they are used to improve interactions between physicians and their patients in the contexts of patient-centered care