Personalization of health information prescription in diabetes clinical setting: A qualitative study

Abstract

Background: The prevalence of diabetes makes considerable costs for health-care organizations. The increase of patient's self-care abilities by use of personalizing health information prescription can reduce these costs. This study was conducted to explore the benefits and challenges related to personalizing health information prescription in diabetes clinical settings.

Materials and methods: The samples included diabetes education officials working in specialized diabetes clinics and Diabetes Research Centre managers of Iran and Tehran Universities of Medical Sciences. They were 21 cases and selected through purposeful sampling method. Semi-structured interview and focus discussion groups were used to collect the viewpoints of specialists. Interview guide, based on literature review and the documents of diabetes, was used in interviews and focus groups. Their validity was affirmed by specialists. The interview texts were coded in MAXQDA10 software and analyzed through content analysis method.

Results: The most important benefits of personalizing health information prescription were classified into five themes as follows: medical services improvement, facilitation of consumers to information resources, improvement in patients' knowledge and awareness, increase in self-care ability and disease management, reinforcing the relation between physician and patient and keeping physician in the information prescription cycle. The challenges of personalizing of health information prescription were revealed as follows: Recognition of patients' personal characteristics at the turn of entering the system, systems' functional modifiers especially bilateral interaction and relation to patient's health file, content recognition, and creating suitable protocol.

Conclusion: This study showed that diabetes clinical settings face different organizational and process challenges for establishing the personalization of health information prescription. The most important challenges which should be considered in designing information prescription in diabetes clinical environments are as follows: reinforcing physicians' recognition of information prescription benefits, lack of integrative electronic health information system, and patient primary assessment in the first stage of entering the patient into the system in respect of clinical and personal aspects in information needs of consumer.

Keywords: Consumer health information; diabetes mellitus; patient education; qualitative research.