JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

During consultations, clinicians must make decisions while relevant patient history, preferences, medical evidence, and outputs from a growing range of decision-support technologies remain dispersed across sources and difficult to integrate when needed. The challenge is not only information availability, but identifying what is relevant to the evolving discussion and introducing it at the appropriate moment without creating unnecessary distraction. This Viewpoint introduces PCAdvocate as a patient-oriented information-support role and proposes a design pattern governed by the principle of selective proactivity. To realize this principle, we define five core capabilities of PCAdvocate as its functional requirements–consultation awareness, longitudinal patient-context access, information-need detection, targeted information seeking, and relevance judgment and calibrated information delivery–and integrate them into a functional framework showing how they work together. We then illustrate this against existing clinical technologies, finding individual capabilities are variably supported across technology classes, but none integrates all five within a system. Finally, we illustrate how the framework could be operationalized through system configuration and use-case scenario, and outline strategies for evaluating future PCAdvocate systems.