JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

With the rise in home care for older adults, there is a growing need to help caregivers manage and communicate health information to support patient safety. Designing ubiquitous technologies that facilitate information interaction is a promising way to improve home care coordination. However, the current design and implementation of technologies or other interventions do not meet caregivers’ needs, impacting adoption. It is critical to gather information about caregivers’ current information management, communication challenges, and experiences in complex home care for older adults to inform effective system design.

Objective:

The objective of this study was to understand how caregivers manage and communicate health information for older adults who require complex home care, informing the design of new technologies to support patient safety in the home.

Methods:

The research involved semi-structured interviews with 15 caregivers, including family and hired caregivers, in Ontario, Canada. An inductive analysis was used to develop themes.

Results:

The findings described how participants were Updating the Caregiver Team to share health information in the home. Participants were also Learning to Improve Care and Decision-Making. However, sometimes participants experienced Conflicts within Caregiver Teams using current technologies, which may not fully meet their information management and communication needs.

Conclusions:

This research highlights the difficulties of caring for older adults in complex home care situations and the challenges that family and hired caregivers face when managing health information and communication. Paper-based technologies are used, but there is a growing interest in digital tools that can efficiently gather and transform health information to better support decision-making. Collaborative digital systems involving family caregivers as important care team members could improve information sharing and reduce conflicts. However, implementing new technologies in this context can be difficult, and successful adoption may require systems that improve the overall caregiving experience in complex environments. The study recommends integrating caregivers as collaborators and implementing two-way communication in digital systems to enhance caregiver satisfaction. Future research should delve deeper into these complexities and prioritize designing effective tools for this crucial caregiving domain.