Towards Patient-Centered Care: The Role of E-Health in Enabling Patient Access to Health Information

Introduction

Access to information is important for enabling effective collaboration between patients and their healthcare providers. Use of information systems (IS) in patient-centered care renders an opportunity to provide individuals access to their own health information (Bailey, 1998) as well as other resources. Today, technological advances have changed how patients and healthcare providers regard health information.

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  The concept of individual access anytime, anyplace, and anywhere is taking shape with the help of online applications that promise greater participation of patients in their own healthcare decisions (Wickramasinghe & Goldberg, 2005).

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  Patients’ access to information can be of benefit or detriment to health outcomes (Carrigan, 1993), and it is important to optimize information delivery and guidance to promote benefits.

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  Individuals from all social and economic backgrounds need to better manage their health, so it is important that an information divide is not created as an unintended consequence of e-health (Currie & Guah, 2006; Luce, Phillips, Benjamin, & Wasson, 2006; Wasson, 2006).

It is important to make the distinction between patient-centered e-health (PCEH) and traditional health IS before we continue our discussion. Traditional health IS were designed to meet the needs of healthcare providers and were used by health workers to assist them in patient care. Many healthcare providers are now developing e-health for use by patients to support searches for health information as well as other interactions with the provider. Key distinctions between traditional health IS and these new forms of PCEH are presented in Table 1. The authors’ vision is that patients’ ability to access to information through PCEH can be used to economically empower them to better manage their health.