Current challenges of personal health information management

Abstract

Purpose

Health care has come to a turning point. Particularly due to aging societies and economic pressure placed on health care system, health is rapidly becoming one's own responsibility. This fundamental paradigm shift does not only affect the way health care services that will be provided in the near future but it also places enormous health information management demands on the laypeople. The purpose of this paper is to look into this emerging phenomenon, its current challenges and available solutions.

Design/methodology/approach

In order to identify different kinds of solutions used for personal health information management (PHIM) and related challenges, a bibliographical review is conducted using five online databases. The review focuses on articles that emphasize personal nature of the health information management. The bibliographical review is also extended to some of the articles cited in the original review. To support discoveries from the bibliographical review, the results are compared to free electronic personal health records of different types.

Findings

The paper identifies some of the most current challenges in the field of PHIM and provides an outline for overcoming them. Proposed guidelines include a concept of citizen pathways (CPs) that can be used for complementing the currently available solutions from a citizen‐centric perspective.

Research limitations/implications

The paper points out near‐future development directions for the PHIM solutions in the form of identified and relevant challenges and characterized CPs. However, the forward‐looking conclusions are based on a bibliographical review and analysis of existing systems, and therefore their functionality and applicability are not tested in practice.

Originality/value

The findings of this paper can be used in shaping PHIM solutions of the near future. The described challenges can also be used to identify potential problems of the internet and new media on a larger scale in the context of health and medical informatics.

Citation

Lahtiranta, J. (2009), "Current challenges of personal health information management", Journal of Systems and Information Technology, Vol. 11 No. 3, pp. 230-243. https://doi.org/10.1108/13287260910983614