Accepted for/Published in: JMIR mHealth and uHealth
Date Submitted: Jan 8, 2019
Date Accepted: May 30, 2019
Applying a User-Centered Approach to the Building of A Mobile Personal Health Record App: Development and Usability Study
ABSTRACT
Background:
A Personal Health Record (PHR) system encourages patients to engage with their own health care by giving them the ability to manage and keep track of their own health data. Of the numerous of PHR systems available in the market, many are Web-based patient portals and a few are mobile apps. They have mainly been created by hospitals and electronic health record (EHR) vendors. One major limitation of these hospital-created PHR systems is that patients can only view specific health data extracted from their Electronic Health Record. Patients do not have the freedom to add important personal health data they collect in their daily lives into their PHR. Therefore, there is an information gap between clinical visits.
Objective:
The goal of this study was to develop and evaluate a new mobile PHR app that can be easily used to manage various types of personal health data to fill the information gap.
Methods:
A user-centered approach was used to guide the development and evaluation of the new mobile PHR app. There were three steps in this study: needs assessment, app design and development, and the conducting of a usability study. First, a large-scale questionnaire study was first conducted with the general population to gain an understanding of their needs and expectations with regards to a mobile PHR app. A mobile PHR app for personal medical data tracking and management was then created based on the results of the questionnaire study. End users were actively involved in all stages of the app development. Finally, a usability study was performed with participants to evaluate the usability of the mobile PHR app which involved asking participants to finish a set of tasks and to respond to a usability questionnaire.
Results:
In the questionnaire study for needs assessment, there were 609 participants in total. The answers from these participants revealed that they wanted to manage various types of personal health data in a mobile PHR app. Participants also reported some features they desired to have in the app. Based on the needs assessment findings, a new mobile PHR app (PittPHR) was created with six major modules: Health Records, Health History, Trackers, Contacts, Appointments, and Resources. This app allows users to customize the list of information trackers according to their own needs, for instance, weight, pain, blood sugar, and period. They can also customize links to websites of health resources useful for their individual needs. In the usability study, there were 15 participants in total. The usability study participants expressed satisfaction with the app and provided comments and suggestions for further development.
Conclusions:
This new mobile PHR app provides options for users to manage a wide range of personal health data conveniently in one place. The app fills the information gap between clinical visits. The study results indicated that this new mobile PHR app meets the need of users and that users welcome this app.
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