JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Many chronic conditions require diet and nutrition management. Although often invisible to the formal health care system, this type of management varies across conditions, across individuals with the same conditions, and over time. Consumer health information technology (CHIT) designed for diet and nutrition management has typically supported this task as everyday life work and not necessarily as illness work. Moreover, it has rarely supported the ways in which diet and nutrition management requires coordination between multiple forms of patient work.

Objective:

Using Crohn’s disease (CD) as a case study, the purpose of this study was to investigate diet and nutrition management as biform work, identify components of articulation work, and provide guidance on how to design CHIT to support this work.

Methods:

We performed a qualitative study in which we recruited participants from CD-related Facebook pages and groups.

Results:

Semi-structured interviews with 21 individuals showed that diet and nutrition management strategies were highly individualized and variable. Four themes emerged from the data, emphasizing the interactions between diet and nutrition and physical, emotional, information, and technology-enabled management.

Conclusions:

This study shows that the extent to which diet and nutrition management is biform work fluctuates over time and that articulation work can be continuous and unplanned. The design guidance specifies the need for patient-facing technologies to support interactions among diet and nutrition and other management activities such as medication intake, stress reduction, and information seeking as well as respond to the ways in which diet and nutrition management needs change over time. Clinical Trial: Not Applicable