JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

In the era of precision medicine, it is critical for health communication efforts to improve the comprehension level of the complex information being presented in the personal health record (PHR).

Objective:

To describe the characteristics that affect the patients’ choice of adopting a PHR.

Methods:

Patients with chronic cardiovascular disease was selected to participate in this study. Seventy-nine patients participated: 48 PHR users and 31 non-users. They completed seven surveys related to their choice to use or not use the PHR: demographics, patient activation, medication adherence, health literacy, and computer self-efficacy.

Results:

There is a significant difference between users and non-users in the sociodemographic measure education (P=0.046). There is no significant difference between users and non-users in sociodemographic measures: age (P=0.20), sex (P=0.35), education (P=0.046), ethnicity (P=0.43), race (P=0.42), and employment (P=0.6360). There is a significant difference between PHR users and PHR non-users in computer self-efficacy (P=0.0032).

Conclusions:

In this study, we demonstrate that sociodemographic characteristics were not an important factor in patients’ use of their PHR except for education. This study had a small sample size and may not have been large enough to detect differences between groups. Our results did demonstrate that there is a difference between PHR users and non-users related to their computer self-efficacy (CSE). This work suggests that incorporating CSE into the design of PHRs is critical. The design of patient facing tools must take into account patients’ preferences and abilities when developing effective user-friendly health information technologies (HIT).