Researchers: Leslie Liu, Jed Brubaker, Melissa Mazmanian, Scott Rudkin, and Gillian Hayes

Currently, most hospitals use numeric pagers as a means of medical personnel communication. These numeric pagers require a person to call the pager number, type in a phone number to call back, and then wait for the receiving end to call back. Using these numeric pagers require medical personnel to share landline phones, creating a health risk for medical personnel and patients alike. We are interested in understanding the experience of clinicians with new mobile devices like mobile and smart phones.

The MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas currently gives all physicians a BlackBerry instead of numeric pagers. The University of California, Irvine Medical Center will also soon deploy VoIP phones with texting capabilities to certain medical personnel. Using both these sites, we would like to understand the different technologies that allow for more information flow than what the numeric pager allows and understand the adoption and use of these technologies in a hospital setting, especially in the realm of “quality patient care”. We must also look at the medical staff’s perception on whether they believe that these smart/mobile phones actually increase, and therefore improve, the communication, thus inherently improving patient care as well.

Student Researchers: Jed Brubaker, Leslie Liu, Sunyoung Park, Chris Combs, So young Li, Sidney Harrison

PIs: Gillian Hayes, Karen Cheng (CDU), Sheba George (CDU), Gene Spiritus (UCI MC), Sherrie Kaplan (UCI Public Health). Yunan Chen

Project: There is no doubt that improving health care in the United States is a major focus for politicians on both sides of the aisle, corporations, and patient advocates.  In many cases, information technology is hoped to be the solution to a variety of problems in health care, such as improving efficiency, patient safety, accountability, billing, and more.

However, development and implementation of large-scale information systems, like electronic medical records (EMR), often require expertise that hospitals and clinics may not have and substantial financial investments that would only be recouped after many years. To successfully implement large-scale health information systems, such as EMRs, we must understand the human processes underlying their implementation, rather than the technological aspects only. Because the evaluation of large-scale health information systems can be incredibly complicated, most evaluations, to date, have been limited in time and scope. Our research team has a unique opportunity to conduct a comprehensive evaluation of the implementation of a large-scale health information technology system in a major research and teaching medical center

This is focused on:

1)    understanding the human-centered and organizational issues of the records transition process;

2)    identifying and evaluating user-level facilitators and barriers to EMR adoption and acceptance; and

3)    identifying and evaluating the organizational factors in adoption and acceptance of EMR.

Evaluating the Usefulness and Usability of Collaborative Personal Health Record Systems

Leslie S. Liu & Gillian R. Hayes

Personal health record systems (PHR) have great potential to improve both health documentation and patient care. The introduction and adoption of these systems, however, have been relatively slow. In this work, through usability evaluations and clinician interviews, we evaluated the usability of, usefulness of, and the ability to communicate and share information through PHR. We describe the results of our evaluation, which demonstrate how a combination of usability, functionality, and socio-cultural influences are impeding PHR adoption and use.

PatientsLikeMe: Empowerment and Representation in a Patient-Centered Social Network

Jed R. Brubaker, Caitlin Lustig, & Gillian R. Hayes

We examine the patient networking site PatientsLikeMe relative to current trends in medicine toward patient-centered care and empowerment. We focus on both patient and institutional demands for personal medical data. Given PatientsLikeMe’s mixture of social networking and health management tools, we consider the role of online health communities in the changing patient/provider relationship, and the use of patient-provided medical data.