PIs: Gillian Hayes, Yunan Chen, Karen Cheng

Co-Investigators: Sheba George (CDU), Gene Spiritus (UCI MC), Sherrie Kaplan (UCI Public Health)

Student Researchers: Soyoung Lee, Sunyoung Park, Boaz Gurdin, Jianlin Shi

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.