Date: Wednesday, April 11th
Time: 9:00 AM
Location: Room 4113
Committee Members:
Dr. Beth St. Jean (Chair)
Dr. Brian Butler
Dr. Eun Kyoung Choe
Dr. Guodong (Gordon) Gao
Title: Defeating Preventable Chronic Diseases: A Proposed Mixed Methods Study of a Mobile Care Management Platform
Abstract:
Chronic diseases are among the most widespread, expensive, and preventable of all health problems, accounting for about 86 percent of the United States’ $2.7 trillion annual health care expenditures. In the face of such staggering numbers, it is surprising our current approach to chronic disease care management has remained largely unchanged for decades, where the care team evaluates the patient and related data infrequently and episodically. Fortunately, this may be changing with the introduction of mobile care management platforms, which can provide more timely and adaptive ways to empower individuals with chronic diseases like congestive heart failure and type 2 diabetes, to improve their disease management self-efficacy and possibly reduce or eliminate their chronic disease burden.
However, there are many unanswered questions surrounding the optimal design and operation of mobile care management platforms. The proposed study will apply a mixed methods approach to evaluate a mobile care management platform with multiple connected medical devices, a smartphone app, real-time assessment engine and a health coach operations dashboard, as deployed in Medicaid populations with poorly controlled chronic diseases. Theory from the information behavior, health behavior change and information systems literatures will inform the analytical framework. The anticipated results will provide theoretical and practical guidance to: (a) inform a deeper understanding of mobile care management platform users (both consumer and professional users); (b) guide future design of these sociotechnical systems; and, (c) generate analytical models to make sense of the diverse mobile care management data streams in novel ways that can inform a more adaptive and precise future chronic care management paradigm.