Data integration
Integrating patient acquired telehealthcare-generated data with the General Practice electronic health record: exploring the views of primary care staff.
Background
This project explored the attitudes of clinical staff to integrating patient accrued data with the primary care electronic record.
Telehealthcare uses remote information/communication technologies to enable the remote delivery of patient-centred care.
Although the substantial resources being invested into telehealthcare are generating large quantities of potentially important clinical data, these are currently not routinely being integrated into the primary care electronic health care record.
The flip side to this is that information overload is already a serious problem for primary care teams and it is not clear whether clinicians would want such patient-generated data uploaded into their systems and if so how these should best be presented.
Aim
To investigate what types and format of patient derived telehealthcare data would be acceptable to primary care clinicians to upload into practice systems.
Method
Using a qualitative study, we demonstrated an already constructed software demonstrator (which can demonstrate an integrated patient derived telehealthcare data platform being piloted in Newham, London).
We interviewed general practitioners and practice nurses to determine the feasibility, potential value and user acceptability (barriers and facilitators) of telehealthcare-generated data integration.
Anticipated benefits
Findings will be used to guide policy on potential integration of telehealthcare-generated data into the new web-based primary care software systems.
Results
This study explored clinicians preferences in how telehealth data may be presented to them.
They had concerns about being overwhelmed with data and expressed a desire that data should come pre-process in summarised form and that this should be presented in the same way as normal data flows in their practice, such as laboratory results or correspondence, with no need to log on to third part websites.
These views have been incorporated into our work in Scale-Up BP.
Paper
Integrating Telehealth Care-Generated Data With the Family Practice Electronic Medical Record: Qualitative Exploration of the Views of Primary Care Staff (Interactive Journal of Medical Research, 2013)
Summary of the results:
| Funder | Chief Scientist Office |
| Chief Investigator | Professor Brian McKinstry |
| Study researcher | Emma Davidson |