The PHR as a mirror of daily life

Posted on June 16, 2008 by Lygeia Ricciardi

Project HealthDesign just released a third e-Primer, this one on observations of daily living. It’s about the role PHRs and related applications can play in helping consumers (and their caregivers) to collect and make use of data about every day experience – like how stress, pollen levels, or what we eat for lunch can impact our health.

Susan Promislo also posted on this topic on the Pioneering Ideas blog. As her post mentions, the Project HealthDesign grantee teams are in Washington DC this week to meet as a group and to visit some Members of Congress to discuss the project’s goals and what it has learned so far.

I had a chance to catch up with several of the grantees today. On the topic of observations of daily living, one team, headed by Barbara Massoudi of Research Triangle Institute, is developing a PHR system for at risk sedentary adults. Accompanying Barbara to Washington is a patient tester, Katy Graham, who has been using a pedometer for several months that helps her to track her level of activity and feed data about it into a customized wellness plan.

Katy told me about how the immediate feedback about what she is doing has helped her to be more aware of her actions (it turns out she was actually walking only a fraction of the amount she thought she was walking) and to make small behavior modifications, like parking her car far away from the parking lot entrance, or choosing the stairs over the elevator.

Personally I think it would be immensely helpful to better understand the gap between some of the assumptions I make about my own behavior and the reality, and to have more sophisticated tools to measure my progress than the calendar with a few sparse X’s on it indicating that I jogged on particular days.

Comments

[Lygeia Ricciardi]

Jane Sarasohn-Kahn wrote about the e-Primer on observations of daily living on her blog, Health Populi. As she puts it, "ODLs are a prime example of how a health management tool can be highly relevant, supportive and motivational to a consumer."

http://www.healthpopuli.com/2008/06/how-daily-living-can-populate-personal.html