Empowering patients with essential information and communication support in the context of diabetes

OBJECTIVES Patients with diabetes need to be aware of essential information to be involved in decision-making, manage diabetes properly, and communicate with doctors and other healthcare providers effectively. We have developed Violet Technology (VT) to provide features beyond previous health information tailoring systems by dynamically prioritizing diabetes learning topics and providing integrated direct support for patient-provider communication through formulation of individualized agendas to take to healthcare encounters. METHODS A particular feature of the VT approach is a Diabetes Information Profile (DIP) that models psychosocial and educational exposure features, as well as clinical characteristics, and considers expressed patient information preferences and recent information browsing history. The agenda facility recommends questions that the patients may have based on their profile, as well as helping to initialize a patient empowerment protocol. The technology uses a modular and extensible approach for key components, including consumer health information, prioritization rules, and methods of instantiating the DIP. VT has been implemented into a web portal for patient use. Two phases of evaluation studies have been conducted to collect patient and healthcare provider feedback. RESULTS AND CONCLUSIONS Results indicate that VT prioritizes relevant and important information for individual patients. Moreover, both patients and providers indicate that formulating an agenda of questions is important for patients. More extensive system use is needed to establish if the technology can deliver an improved patient-provider partnership and, ultimately, improved health outcomes.