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Designing a Personal Health Application for Older Adults to Manage Medications: A Comprehensive Case Study

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Abstract

Older adults with multiple chronic conditions often go through care transitions where they move between care facilities or providers during their treatment. These transitions are often uncoordinated and can imperil patients by omitted, duplicative, or contradictory care plans. Older adults sometimes feel overwhelmed with the new responsibility of coordinating the care plan with providers and changing their medication regimes. In response, we developed a Lesser General Public License (LGPL) open source, web-based Personal Health Application (PHA) using an iterative participatory design process that provided older adults and their caregivers the ability to manage their personal health information. In this paper, we document the PHA design process from low-fidelity prototypes to high-fidelity prototypes over the course of six user studies. Our findings establish the imperative need for interdisciplinary research and collaboration among all stakeholders to create effective PHAs. We conclude with design guidelines that encourage researchers to gradually increase functionality as users become more proficient.

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Notes

  1. This information does not include data for four older adults from user study 2 because the data was lost in transit.

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Acknowledgements

We thank our participants and expert review panel for their valuable feedback. We also thank the reviewers for their insightful and constructive comments. This research was funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Project HealthDesign Grant RWJ59880 (PI Stephen E. Ross).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, University of Colorado at Boulder, 430 UCB, Boulder, 80309-0430, CO, USA

    Katie A. Siek, Danish U. Khan & Jane Meyers

  2. Division of General Internal Medicine, University of Colorado Denver, Denver, 80202-1702, CO, USA

    Stephen E. Ross

  3. Denver Veterans Affairs Medical Center, Denver, 80220, CO, USA

    Leah M. Haverhals

  4. Anschutz Medical Campus, University of Colorado Denver, Denver, 80217, CO, USA

    Steven R. Cali

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  1. Katie A. Siek
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  2. Danish U. Khan
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Correspondence to Katie A. Siek.

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Siek, K.A., Khan, D.U., Ross, S.E. et al. Designing a Personal Health Application for Older Adults to Manage Medications: A Comprehensive Case Study. J Med Syst 35, 1099–1121 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10916-011-9719-9

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