increasing concern regarding the significance of information and communication technology and the e-health

In recent years, there has been a growing worry about the importance of information and communication technology, as well as e-health explanations that are tailored to satisfy the health needs of healthcare consumers. Consumer informatics is the primary field that addresses this growing concern. Consumer informatics plays an important role in giving information to patients and public consumers of healthcare services because it promotes self-care, provides up-to-date decision making, promotes healthy attitudes, and facilitates the interchange of ideas among peers. The emergence of consumer informatics is as a result of many patients desire to accept roles concerning their health and the increasing desire of the nurses to value the patients’ effort towards their health.

Introduction

Consumer health informatics can be defined as nursing informatics that analyzes customers’ necessities for information, research and execute strategies of making informatics available to consumers, and paradigms and incorporate consumers’ likes into the medical information systems (Eysenbach, 2000). In addition, the American Informatics Association defines Consumer informatics as a sub-branch in medical informatics that studies from the consumer point of view the use of electronic information and communication so as to make changes in the health results and the process of decision making in the healthcare system (Fields, 2016). On the other hand, a consumer in nursing field can be defined as an individual that can access medical services and information for own health requirement at any time whether sick or in good health.

The great development witnessed in consumer health platforms such as websites, online support group, and computerized patient-centered communication has posed new threat in the nursing field; thus, the nurses have the mandate to ensure that their patients and the community can access and understand health information to improve their health status. In addition, there is a rising desire among the patients to act responsibly on their health matters, a desire that also the nurses and clinical practitioners possess to adequately appreciate the ability of patients and their families cooperation towards the evolution of collaborative information technology explanation accessible to consumers (Eysenbach, 2000). In addition, the urge for consumer informatics is sphere headed by the cost-saving demand in the health system and the idea that allowing consumers to have access to information will enhance the quality of care as well as cut on medical cost through the realization of self-help capability of the patient and the family at large. Furthermore, desire for consumer informatics is increasing due to high pressure on consumers to actively engage in healthcare and the increasing requirement for health information technologies to help patients in engaging in matters affecting their health.

Moreover, consumers have recently become partners in matters of their health as portrayed through the emergence of inspired, computer-literate clients that has given birth to physician-patients correlation, thus, witnessing one of the major, profound achievement in the information technology. Including generation of health records that are available online providing the patients with the opportunity to perform online doctoring in an instance of e-commerce and e-banking Eysenbach, 2000).

Subsequently, the emergence of consumer informatics came up with packages of advantages to both the consumer and health professionals as discussed:

Customers enjoy conformability and self-service

The increasing capability for consumers of health to educate themselves on various aspects including health terms, learning on several diseases, their diagnosis and treatment have greatly increased the general knowledge of consumers of health services. Consumer informatics has enabled the users of health to find out about any health issue that is accessible at their convenience; also, the self-service properties in clients portal enables the client to book an appointment with their doctors, make payments and keep problem list. Self-service portal helps the clients to schedule time when they can comfortably meet with their doctors and discuss issues affecting them, seek medical advice and learn more about matters concerning compliance with therapies and medication; so that adjustment can be made most especially to patients with terminal illness such as diabetes, cancer and HIV/AIDS (Kaye, 2009). In addition, the self-service will notify the customer when they are supposed to be meeting with their doctors, make payment or the topic of discussion, since it acts as a reminder for a particular activity and when it should happen including time and date.

Aids in engagement with medical practitioners

Consumers of health can digitally engage with their medical practitioners through health platforms and services including web-based videophone technologies like Skype whereby the patient can video chat with their health professionals in matters regarding their health. Skype facilitates demonstrations since it involves live videos, for instance, the health professional can demonstrate how to dress a wound, performing a simple first aid and the patient can describe how they feel by touching areas paining among other issues that the patient wants to talk about (Murphy, 2011). Similarly, the patient can be able to get information through other digital devices such as emails through which the client receive general health guidance in notes or videos that can be helpful for a specific health concern or general health improvement. Besides, digitally interactions can greatly help consumers with low self-esteem or rather those who are shy to explain their problems in face to face sessions.

Enhancing individual information tracking and management

With the daily advances made in the application and devices for consumers’ benefit in using health services. The following can be achieved:

(1) Consumers can make use of applications such as mobile health to monitor and control their health, and with the changing trends, they can be updated on any health issue that a cure has been found or how to manage their health. For, example, through the mobile health app many patients have been able to track and manage their monthly periods; thus, unwanted pregnancy has been minimized among couples, therefore, enhancing proper child spacing. Additionally, patients with high weight access various methods to manage weight which are being updated on a daily basis (Nagle et al., 2016).

(2) Consumers can utilize the Personal Health Records to combine health records and information from several sources. The personal health records facilitate the ability of the patient to securely and confidently save and track their health information, for instance, high blood pressure control plans, personal information including the contact, diagnosis, aspects that one is allergic to and history of immunization (Nagle et al., 2016). Also, the personal health records can enable the consumer of health services to find information that has a similarity of the health issue the consumer needs information from or is suffering from, thus, in one way solve the health problem easily if the problem similar to the consumer has initially been solved. Therefore, making it easy to manage a health problem due to information found in several sources.

(3) Consumers can access first-hand information from the health professionals, thus, reducing problems that are associated with the wrong diagnosis of certain health problems. Information is readily available through the portals that allow the consumer to get direct information from the care providers. Hence, chances of getting a misleading information are almost zero thus consumers can manage and control a particular health problem safely (Nagle et al., 2016).

Disadvantages of consumer informatics

To consumers

Inaccurate information

Despite the accessibility of data from various sources to aggregate to personal health records, there is a rising fear regarding information accuracy and reliability more so when the clients tend to update their data. It is argued that there is no specific guideline that directs the consumer on how to update their health information for instance lab reports, diagnosis and medical history (Bates et al., 2006). Also, a specific strategy to extract information such as lab reports and prescription labels is unavailable, and information regarding lab reports are not up to update resulting to inaccurate information when the patient tries to extract information from the personal health records found online.

Difficulty in interpreting available information

Using the online platform at times can be very difficult to interpret information since there is a lot of information on the internet regarding a specific health problem that the consumer wants to find out. Also, the information available may vary thus the consumer may not be able to understand which information is credible and quality, hence, a consumer can get a misleading information regarding management of a particular health issue. In addition, due to varying information consumers may not be able to tell if it current information or outdated and sometimes an interpretation is needed especially when extracting data associated with lab reports and files (Bates et al., 2006).

To health professionals

Inadequate resources

Adequate resources are needed to ensure that consumers have access to inspiring and interactive technologies, a factor that is very difficult to achieve. For implementation of health devices and application to be successful, training and empowerment is needed so that the health providers will have the knowledge and skills on how to respond to various needs of patients; a process that needs a lot of resources such as the mobile application and finance to engage a specific number of health professionals. Thus, not all the professionals will get a chance to attend the training and access to health app due to inadequate resources to meet the high number of health professionals (Bates et al., 2006).

Integration difficulty

Obtaining and accumulating a variety of data required to assist healthcare clients and ability to warrant that the content available is easily comprehended by the clients is a major integration challenge facing the healthcare practitioners. Similarly, the capacity to filter content to meet the client’s needs and the ability to ensure that data is available is another challenge facing the health providers in integrating this issues due to outdated information found in the health record of consumers concerning their medical results and records also, due to large volume of information in the internet regarding users of the health services, it becomes almost impossible to integrate the information since majority of the data available is almost the same and differentiating between credible information of a patient is a challenging task (Kaye, 2009). Furthermore, integration can be impossible in cases where hacking is daily activity and clients fear to provide all their health information.

Bridging the challenges in consumer informatics

Assisting the clients to get access to the appropriate health information

Several consumers tend to get unreliable information from the internet due to use of short and general searching questions. To resolve this, the Health Information Query Assistant was developed that aids consumers obtain credible information from the internet through directing the clients’ queries to the appropriate websites (Alpay et al., 2009). Similarly, the application of theoretical models of information approach enables consumers to get information in various health websites by redirecting their queries to specific health application and websites where they can get the intended information which is helpful in resolving their health needs. This application is appropriate for adult consumers of health who in most cases encounter problems in accessing the right information on the internet.

Formulation of approaches to help consumers’ access quality health-related websites

A number of approaches have been developed to help consumers get quality information from trusted and reliable sources; this includes Centre for Health Information Quality, Comprehensive Health Enhancement Support system, and Code of the American Medical Association. The mentioned websites contain health information that is updated and not customized to fit their needs hence helpful to the consumer needs (Alpay et al, 2009).

References

Alpay, L., Verhoef, J., Xie, B., Dov Te’eni, & JHM, Z. (2009). Current challenge in

consumer health informatics: Bridging the gap between access to information and information understanding. Biomedical Informatics Insights, 2, 1.

Bates, B., Romina, S., Ahmed, R., & Hopson, D. (2006). The effect of source credibility on consumers’ perceptions of the quality of health information on the Internet. Medical Informatics & The Internet In Medicine, 31(1), 45-52.

Eysenbach, G. (2000). Consumer health informatics. BMJ : British Medical Journal, 320(7251), 1713–1716.

Fields, W., & Fields, L. (2016). Informatics and Patient Engagement: A Personal Story. Online Journal Of Nursing Informatics, 20(1), 8-1

Kaye, M. (2009). Health literacy and informatics in the geriatric population: the challenges and opportunities. Online Journal of Nursing Informatics, 13(3), 1-19.

Murphy, J. (2011). Nursing Informatics. Engaging Patients and Families in eHealth. Nursing Economic$, 29(6), 339-341.

Nagle, L., Arnaert, A., Booth, R., Boryck, E., Doyle, G., Duncan, C., . . . Furlong, K. (2016). Consumer Health Solutions: A Teaching and Learning Resource for Nursing Education. Canadian Association of Schools of Nursing,1-52.