E-Patient Update: Give Us Patient Data Analytics

The other day, I sat down with my husband to check out the features of his new connected glucose monitor. My husband, a Type 2 diabetic, had purchased the Accu-Chek Aviva Connect, which when synched with a computer, displays readings data on the web.

After synching up his results with his desktop via Bluetooth, he entered a web portal and boom! There was a two-week history of his readings, with data points organized by what times they were taken. As part of its dashboard, the portal also displayed the highest and lowest readings taken during the time period, as well as citing the average difference between high and low readings (the size of the delta).

By going over this data, we were able to learn a few things about his current disease management efforts. For example, we saw that virtually all of the highest readings were taken between 6PM and 9PM, which helped him identify some behaviors that he could change.

Of course, for the professionals reading this, none of these features are all that impressive. In fact, they’re practically kid’s stuff, though I imagine his endocrinologist will get at least some benefit from the charts.

But I’m here to tell you that as patient data management goes, this is off-the-charts cool. After all, neither of us has had a chance to track key health metrics and act on them, at least not without doing our own brute number crunching with a spreadsheet. As you can imagine, we greatly prefer this approach.

Unfortunately, few patients have access to any kind of analytics tools that put our health data in context. And without such tools most of us don’t get much benefit out of accessing the data. It’s time for things to change!

Upgrade the portal

One of the most common ways patients access their health data is via a provider portal. Most commonly, portals display the results of diagnostic tests, including lab tests and the text of imaging results.

Sharing this data is a step in the right direction, but it’s not likely to empower patients on its own. After all, even an experienced clinician would find it difficult to make sense of dozens (or in the case of chronically-ill patients like me, hundreds) of test results.  Even if the portal provided educational material on each test, it may be too much information for a patient to absorb.

On the other hand, patients could do a lot with their data if it was displayed in a patient-friendly manner. The possibilities for improving data display are manifold. They include:

  • Displaying tests relating to specific concern (such as thyroid levels) in sequence over time
  • Offer a chart comparing related data points, such as blood pressure levels and cardiac functioning or kidney functioning paired with blood glucose levels
  • Display only outlier test values, along with expected ranges, and link to an explanation of what these values might mean
  • Have the portal auto-generate a list of questions patients should ask their doctor, based on any issues suggested by test data

By provider standards, these displays might be fairly mundane. But speaking as a patient, I think they’d be very valuable. I am compulsive enough to check all of my health data and follow up with questions, but few patients are, and any tools which helped them decide what action to take would represent a big step forward.

It would be even more useful if patients could upload results from health bands or smartwatches and cross-reference that data with testing results. But for the short term, it would be enough to help patients understand the data already in the system.

Giving patients more power

At first, some providers might object to giving patients this much information, as odd as it may sound. I’ve actually run into situations where a practice won’t share test data with a patient until the doctor has “approved” the results, apparently because they don’t want patients to be frightened by adverse information.

But if we want to engage patients, providers have to give give patients more power. If nothing else, we need a better way to look at our data, and learn how we can respond effectively.

To be fair, few providers will have the resources in-house to add patient data analytics tools to portals. Their vendors will have to add upgrades to their portal software, and that’s not likely to happen overnight. After all, while the technical challenges involved are trivial, developers will need to decide exactly how they’re going to analyze the data and what search capabilities patients should have.

But there’s no excuse for letting this issue go, either. If providers want patients to engage in their healthcare process, helping them understand their health data is one of the most important steps they can take. Expecting patients to dive in and figure it out themselves is unlikely to work.

About the author

Anne Zieger

Anne Zieger is a healthcare journalist who has written about the industry for 30 years. Her work has appeared in all of the leading healthcare industry publications, and she's served as editor in chief of several healthcare B2B sites.

   

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