Design, Implementation, and Evaluation of Self-Describing Diabetes Medical Records: A Pilot Study

BACKGROUND: Each patient’s medical record consists of data specific to that patient and is therefore an appropriate source to adapt educational information content. OBJECTIVES: This study aimed to design and implement an information provision system based on the medical records of diabetic patients and to investigate the attitudes of users toward using this product. METHODS: The study was organized into three phases: need analysis, design and implementation, and final evaluation. The aim of the need analysis phase was to investigate the questioning behavior of the patient in the real-world context. The design and implementation phase consisted of four stages: determining the minimum dataset for diabetes medical records, collecting and validating content, designing and implementing a diabetes electronic medical record system, and data entry. Evaluating the final system was done based on the constructs of the technology acceptance model in the two dimensions of perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use. A semistructured interview was used for this purpose. RESULTS: Three main categories were extracted for the patient’s perceived usefulness of the system: raising the self-awareness and knowledge of patients, improving their self-care, and improving doctor-patient interaction. Both patients and physicians perceived the personalized sense of information as a unique feature of the application and believed that this feature could have a positive effect on the patient’s motivation for learning and using information in practice. Specialists believed that providing personal feedback on the patient’s lab test results along with general explanations encourages the patients to read the content more precisely. Moreover, accessing medical records and helpful notes was a new and useful experience for the patients. CONCLUSIONS: One of the key perceived benefits of providing tailored information in the context of medical records was raising patient awareness and knowledge. The results obtained from field observations and interviews have shown that patients were ready to accept the system and had a positive attitude when it was put into practice. The findings related to user attitude can be used as a guideline to design the next phase of the research (ie, investigation of system effectiveness on patient outcomes).