By Barbara L. Massoudi, RTI International, BreathEasy Principal Investigator.
The BreathEasy team has spent significant time this past month developing our focus group guides to begin to understand the users’ (both patients’ and clinicians’) needs for the PHR tool. The guides will help us facilitate the discussion around particular topics that are of interest to our research team. There are so many things we’d like to know about the users’ needs, preferences, opinions, beliefs, etc., that paring down the topics is challenging. Here’s are some of the questions we’re thinking about including, please let me know in the comments if you have some other ideas we’d want to consider as well.
Living with asthma and depression or anxiety
What are the biggest challenges in living with these diseases or conditions? How do they affect your daily life? Does one condition seem to outweigh the other? Do these conditions make the other worse?
How easy or difficult is it to talk with your doctor or nurse about your symptoms? Do you keep notes about your health condition or do you just try to remember? How long is it usually between visits to the doctor? Do you find that you have trouble answering questions when it’s been a long time between visits?
How would you feel about a personal health record tool to help you with your conditions? What should it be able to do? How would you use it? What do you think it would be important for your doctor to know about your symptoms and health behaviors, including your personal triggers (read ODLs)? Do you think it would be easy or difficult to keep track of these things?
The BreathEasy smart phone app
Do you use a cell phone? Is your cell phone a smart phone? Do you use apps? What do you like about your favorite apps? Does your phone have a virtual keyboard? Do you find it easy to use or would you prefer to use a physical keyboard?
What would you think about using a free smart phone app to collect and record your symptoms and health behaviors? What problems could you see with using a smart phone app this way? Would you report symptoms as they occurred, or at the end of the day?
Communicating with the doctors and nurses
How would you feel about your healthcare providers being able to see what you record between appointments? How would you feel about discussing the symptoms and health behaviors you recorded with your healthcare provider? How do you think they would react to this type of system?
What’s next?
Once we hold the focus groups and gather the users’ inputs, we’ll being developing the BreathEasy tool. A subset of our focus group participants will then return in the fall to evaluate the prototype through some usability testing. More on that to come…
Comments