Effective use of patient-centric health information systems: The influence

Effective use of patient-centric health information systems: The influence of patient emotion

The Effect of Self-management Systems on Coping with Stress and Anxiety in Chronic Patients

Self-management programs have been introduced in order to help chronic patients better manage their symptoms, treatments, and the physical, as well as the psychosocial consequences and lifestyle changes inherent in living with a chronic condition. As many chronic patients tend to also suffer from mental health issues, such as depression and anxiety, coping resources and constructive coping strat-egies can also help them improve their psychological health, which in turn can help them improve their quality of life. Information technologies can provide useful opportunities for improving the self-management support that are provided to chronic illnesses such as asthma, especially when they can be integrated with patients’ ongoing medical care and by enabling the patients to also better cope with mental health issues. The present paper describes an exploratory study that studied 17 asthma patients who used a self-management system and examined if and how the system also helped them cope with the negative emotions evoked by their disease. Adopting a coping theory perspective, the paper identi-fied several coping responses that the studied self-management system seemed to support, and developing future self-management systems so that they can also support these coping responses can be useful for improving the health of chronically ill patients

The Impact of IT Identity on Users’ Emotions: A Conceptual Framework in Health-Care Setting

Stimulating positive emotions in patients and alleviating their negative emotions is valuable in health care IT contexts. One form of health IT are patient-centric tools which are used directly by patients to facilitate access to their medical history, and receive feedback about their health status. The goal of this study is to understand what factors influence the arousal of emotions in patients while using these tools. Past studies tend to emphasize on how IT shapes emotions, underplaying the role of the individual user and his/her shared identity with IT in the process. In this research, we argue that patients’ IT identity (i.e., the extent to which they consider IT as integral to their sense of self) and their core self-evaluation (i.e., their sense of how capable they are in managing their disease) can play important roles in shaping users’ evaluation of IT, and eventually their emotions about IT

Early-age Digital Experience Helps Form IT Identity and Its Impact on Workplace Performance

One of the most anticipated questions in the digital age is how the generation who grew up with digital technologies will behave in the workplace. We investigate the role of early-age digital experience on performance drawing on IT identity theory. Specifically, we hypothesized that early-age digital experience indirectly relates to job performance and work innovation sequentially via IT identity and digital creativity. Additionally, perceived managerial support amplifies IT identity’s influences on digital creativity as well as the indirect effects of early-age digital experience on work results. Data collected via a multiple-source and multiple-wave survey from 281 employees in a large Internet company support the research model. This research enriches the understanding of what drives individuals’ digital creativity and demonstrates that employees with early-age digital experience are critical resources for organizational competitive advantage in a digital economy. Practical implications for employees’ early-age digital use and workplace management are discussed

Too Much of a Good Thing? An Investigation of the Negative Consequences of Information Security in a Healthcare Setting

Information security is becoming a prime concern for individuals and organizations. This is especially true in healthcare settings where widespread adoption of integrated health information systems means that a vast amount of highly sensitive information on patients is accessible through many interaction points across the care delivery network. In this research in progress, we seek to uncover how individuals react when they perceive that their security environment is stressful. To do so, we conducted a case study using an inductive approach based on semi-structured interviews with 41 participants. The preliminary analysis of some of our interviews showed that too much security in a health setting can bring in negative consequences like evoking negative emotions in users toward the system, increased dissatisfaction, and increase of inappropriate workarounds, which can lead to ineffective usage of the system and eventually can put patients’ health at risk

Functional Affordance Archetypes: a New Perspective for Examining the Impact of IT Use on Desirable Outcomes

IT usage is generally viewed as a key indicator of adoption success and a prerequisite for deriving benefits. Yet, while IT usage can provide a good measure of adoption success, it does not necessarily yield desirable outcomes, i.e., the individual benefits expected by its designers. This paper investigates how IT use leads to its desirable outcomes based on a functional affordance (FA) perspective (Markus and Silver 2008). Specifically, we define perceived functional affordances (PFA) as an IT’s afforded possibilities for action as perceived by an individual user. Further, by following Eisenhardt’s (1989) approach of theory building from multiple cases, we develop a PFA typology and introduce four PFA archetypes: i.e. Facilitator, Guardian Angel, Imposer, and Inhibitor. Subsequently, we intend to use these archetypes to explain under what conditions the PFA of an e-health system can be transformed into usage that is conducive to the attainment of its desirable outcomes

Effective Use of Patient-Centric Health Information Systems: the Influence of Patient Emotions

The present study examined how patients’ emotional responses to a Portal (i.e., a pa- tient-centric health IT designed to help patients self-manage their chronic condition) influ- enced their effective use of the Portal. Based on interview data collected from 34 asthma patients, we identified six categories of emotions that the Portal’s usage evoked in patients who participated in the study. While patients who had negative emotions about the Portal tended to always use it ineffectively, the effectiveness with which patients who had positive emotions used the Portal varied according to their differing perceptions of the Portal. In addition, while all positive emotions were associated with high frequencies of Portal use, this usage was not always effective as it was sometimes not aligned with the Portal’s goal of asthma self-management. These findings suggest that designers and implementers need to pay greater attention to the emotional responses that patient-users can have, and to try to minimize the emergence of negative emotions by designing systems that induce in patients a positive experience and self-image, as well as joy while promoting their effective usage of these systems.

A MULTILEVEL PERSPECTIVE ON IT AFFORDANCES

The concept of affordance views IT as socio-technical artefacts and affordances as bridges between artefacts and their users, and has been defined as what an individual, group or organization with a particular purpose can do with a technology. The present research examines IT affordances via a mul-ti-level perspective, with a focus on the relationship between feature-level and system-level affordanc-es. More specifically, the present study examines how macro (system) level IT affordances emerge from micro (feature) level affordances via an exploratory case study approach in an e-health context to analyse data from 16 asthma patients who used a web-based, user-centric portal to self-manage their asthma. The results of our analysis suggest that system-level and feature-level affordances of the portal were not necessarily the same for each patient, and the system-level affordances played an es-sential role in determining their attitudes and behaviors toward the portal

Affordance Networks: An Approach for Linking IT features-in-use to Their Effects

Arguing that affordances of an IT can have a hierarchical and network structure, this paper proposes an approach to identify the actualized affordances of an IT artifact and its hierarchical and network structure for a group of users. Based on methods suggested for analyzing social networks, the paper proposes an approach to create a hierarchical network of affordances for a group of users, with affordances that are the closest to the IT artifact clustered at one end, and affordances that are closest to the IT’s consequences clustered at the other end. The resulting affordance network of the IT can provide a context-dependent image of IT usage, which helps in understanding how the IT is used and appropriated, how IT features can trigger long-term outcomes, and what consequences can be anticipated from IT for user groups. This in turn can help improve its design