Overview

Advisory Committee

The symposium benefited from the support of an advisory committee during the planning and development of the program. Advisory committee members include:

Samir Chatterjee, Associate Professor, School of Information Systems and Technology, Claremont Graduate University
Julia Chu, Professional Resources, QTC Management
David Finegold, Professor, Strategy and Organization, Keck Graduate Institute of Applied Life Sciences
Thomas A. Horan, Associate Professor, School of Information Systems and Technology, Claremont Graduate University
Robert Jenders, Associate Professor of Clinical Medicine, University of California, Los Angeles
Steeve Kay, QTC Management Founder
Leonard Kleinman, Director of the Telehealth Program, VA Greater Los Angeles Healthcare System, Associate Clinical Professor of Medicine, Geffen School of Medicine, University of California, Los Angeles
Synthia Molina, Founder, NHIN Central
Lorne Olfman, Professor and Dean, School of Information Systems and Technology, Claremont Graduate University, Fletcher Jones Chair in Information Technology

Background

A number of factors have converged to re-focus attention on the healthcare establishment�s rightful topic, the patient. This shift has been observed for some time. In 1997, Kenneth Kizer, then Undersecretary for Health at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs noted that �the patient is the center of the health care universe� [1] and cited the need for a paradigm shift in how we view the relationship between the individual and healthcare technology. This notion of a person-centric care model has since been taken up in many venues and is becoming a dominant conceptual model of the healthcare system [2-4] . Realization that person-centric electronic systems should represent many faces of the healthcare system is an important step in increasing awareness to the specific issues that these many faces introduce.

The future of healthcare will not only focus on sickness or chronic illnesses, but also focus on lifestyle and disabilities. Emphasizing lifestyle related issues such as health promotion and prevention will eventually promote the fact that a person will have a health record even if they do not get sick [5] . This new focus will be the driver for the shift from healthcare institution-centered care to person-centered care. Disability is another important portion of the healthcare system and needs special attention under the person-centric approach. Traditional medical record systems are designed for keeping records of medical conditions that are usually followed by a treatment process. Disabilities, on the other hand, are usually followed by a financial compensation process and therefore the requirements for record keeping are significantly different from a treatment-oriented process. Medical records of patients in the traditional system translate into medical evidence of claimants in a disability compensation system. New systems such as eDib from the Social Security Administration are being developed in order to overcome this mismatch. These new systems seek to provide an improved way of medical record generation and keeping that can address the needs of compensation oriented processes.

Objectives

The objectives of the symposium are:

To understand how person-centric health systems can address the diverse health needs of the user communities (lifestyle, chronic illness, disability).
To identify key research findings and needs for achieving person-centric health systems that serve the many faces of the user communities.
To facilitate the discussion between researchers and practitioners, with special attention to Southern California.

Outcomes

Expected outcomes of the symposium are that:

This symposium will be the first step in developing a taxonomy of User-Types for EHR by taking into account the needs of diverse populations.
Use-Cases of EHR and its subsets for healthy, chronically ill, and disabled populations will be identified.

These user groups can later be extended to include other users groups that exist in these diverse populations.

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References

[1] K. Kizer, "Forms in the Fog: Information Management in the New VA"." Austin, TX: U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, 1997.

[2] S. Abidi, "An Intelligent Tele-Healthcare Environment Offering Person-Centric and Wellness-Maintenance Services," Journal of Medical Systems, vol. 25, no. 3, pp. 147-165, 2001.

[3] "Healthvision E-Health Glossary," Healthvision, 2004.

[4] B. Pascal, "Toward a Pan-Canadian Electronic Health Record Service," in the Proceedings of Partnership Conference, Vancouver, BC, 2001.

[5] I. Iakovidis, "Towards personal health record: current situation, obstacles and trends in implementation of electronic healthcare record in Europe," International Journal of Medical Informatics, vol. 52, pp. 105-115, 1998.