Transforming consumer health informatics: connecting CHI applications to the health-IT ecosystem

In their paper “Transforming Consumer Health Informatics through a Patient Framework: connecting patients to context”[1], Valdez and colleagues propose a “patient-work” framework based on an holistic view of patient’s socio-environmental context that should streamline Consumer Health Informatics (CHI) application development and deployment. However, the proposed framework does not consider CHI applications as potential actors of the healthcare digital information flow, within the so-called “health-IT ecosystem” envisaged by the Health Information Exchange (HIE) movement[2]. In this letter, we propose a framework for the integration of CHI applications into the “health-IT ecosystem”. This is in line with the American Medical Association (AMA) vision for improving Electronic Health Record (EHR) usability by facilitating “Digital and Mobile Patient Engagement” through “interoperability between patient’s mobile technology and the EHR” [3]. We believe that such integration is a fundamental pre-requisite for CHI applications that, together with the holistic “patient-work” design perspective, will lead to full adoption and effectiveness for better patient care. In the healthcare switch to a patient-centered and home-settled paradigm, self-care and self-management add new expanded responsibilities for patients, families, and communities. CHI has the potential to enable this scenario [1].