Do patients care about their raw data?

Do patients care about their raw data?  The question is how much detail do patients want to see….

My opinion is that patients care about what the data tells them to do or what it teaches them, rather than the detailed readings.

Unfortunately, we’re all patients with medical conditions sometime during our lives.  The key is to remember that people who use home medical devices themselves are not full-time patients.  They have family, work, hobbies, and other interests to spend time on.

Would you rather play a board game with your daughter or spend time analyzing a graph about your blood sugar?  Most people would skip the graph.

For someone in the medical field, this example is hard to understand.  However, look at it from a financial point of view.  Pretend that your financial advisor was giving you an hourly cell phone update on your portfolio.  Would you ask them to lose your cell phone number?

Given a choice, what would you rather have as a patient?

1. A system that shows you each natural fluctuation in your readings.  This means that if you are weighing yourself 3 times a day, you’ll see the pound or two that you change due to the position of the moon and how hydrated you are.
   • Advantages
     • I can see all of my data, so if I want to learn everything about myself on a minute by minute basis, it is available.
   • Disadvantages
     • I’ll be scared during normal fluctuations that are due to the margin of error.
     • I’ll be spending a lot of time doing analysis of data points that I’m not really qualified to do.
     • I’ll be calling my doctor more often about false positives.
     • I’ll lose track of the big picture when looking at minute by minute readings.
2. A system that tells gives you one of the following descriptions and provides an explanation as to why it recommends that action:
   • Go to the hospital, because…
   • Get a doctor’s appointment soon, because…
   • You may be getting worse, because…
   • You may be getting better, because…
   • etc…

Hopefully, we can work to simplify patients’ lives to get them the information that they want to know – no more, no less.

Tagged as: data, medical devices, usability