Personalized Health Alerts Improve Treatment
By Katie Wike, contributing writer
Alerting patients with chronic conditions of needed care through electronic alerts can help providers improve treatment.
“Over 140 million people in the United States have at least one chronic medical condition, but they receive fewer than 60 percent of guideline-recommended services for these conditions,” notes a report published in Telemedicine and e-Health. “Increasing patients’ involvement in their own care may improve the receipt of guideline-recommended services. We evaluated patients’ patterns of responses to notifications regarding guideline-recommended services delivered through a personalized health record (PHR).”
Researchers enrolled 584 cardiac patients who were at high risk for cardiovascular disease. According to iHealth Beat, these participants were enrolled in a personal health records (PHR) system that sent them alerts for needed care. These “prevention gaps” included regular care such as mammograms or liver function testing. Patients with gaps received a maximum of three messages per week for all services due within a two-month window.
Fierce EMR explains 86 percent of the patients received at least one reminder; of those, 61 percent accessed the PHR or received the care that triggered the message after just one message. Seventy-three percent did so after the second message. The rates were higher than alerts via telephone, mail or a passive PHR.
“Most chronic medical conditions require periodic to daily monitoring that is best accomplished by a patient–provider team. Active notifications through a PHR can be used to provide patient-centered decision support, without incurring alert fatigue,” note the report.
“These tools may help achieve better care and health for patients. Future work should evaluate the effect of such tools on chronic disease outcomes, may vary time between notifications or take scheduled procedures into account, and should continue to evaluate the threshold at which patients begin to ignore notifications or exhibit alert fatigue.”