It is great to see the latest, Digital Health & Care Innovation Centre, review paper: User Requirements for Co Managed Digital Health and Care in JMIR Publications. Read the review and share with your network’s Authors: Chaloner Chute, Dr Tara French, Sneha Raman, Jay Bradley.
This study aimed to present a set of recurring user requirements and themes for co-managed digital health and care services derived from the body of co-design projects within a digital health and care program. This study aimed to enable people and organizations looking to reorient their approach to health and care research and delivery from a system-led and condition-specific approach to a more person-centric, whole-of-life model.
This paper presents a set of 14 common user requirements that resulted from a review of co-design projects. The findings demonstrate overlapping and reinforcing sets of needs from citizens and care professionals related to how data are co-managed to improve care and outcomes. This paper discusses the alignment, contrasts, and gaps with broader, comparable literature. It highlights consensus around requirements for personal health storytelling, sharing data on care experiences and how this can support personalized guidance, visualize trends to support decision-making, and generally improve dialog between a citizen and care professionals. These findings identify gaps around how groups and networks of people engage, posing difficult questions for people designing support services as some of the user requirements are not easily met by organizations operating in silos.
This study proposes future recommendations for citizens as active, informed, and consenting partners using new forms of privacy-preserving digital infrastructure that puts the citizen in firm control. It is also recommended that these findings be used by people developing new digital services to ensure that they can start with knowledge of the broader user requirement context. This should inform domain-specific research and development questions and processes. Further work is needed to extend these common requirements to more explicitly consider the trust framework required when citizens comanage their data and care across a broad range of formal and informal actors. Consideration of how authority, delegation, and trust function between members of the public will be critical.
Discover more about the Digital Health & Care Innovation Centre:
The Digital Health & Care Innovation Centre is a national resource, funded by the Scottish Government and the Scottish Funding Council. A world-leading collaboration between The Glasgow School of Art and the University of Strathclyde, its focus is innovation in digital health and care helping the people of Scotland live longer, healthier lives while providing sustainable and inclusive growth for our economy. This activity includes attracting inward investment and trade missions with Scottish businesses.
We collaborate, co-design and transform great ideas into real solutions that have benefits to the system and Scotland’s citizens. We have several key assets open to our partners including our DHI Exchange, that provides access to open architecture to quickly prove data integration. This can often lead to the opportunity to gain access to a variety of Real-World Environments and living lab testbeds.
We work extensively with the Scottish Government, NHS, Local Government, Academic Institutions, Commercial organisations (SMEs through to Enterprise-level organisations) and our Citizens, who are at the heart of what we do and why we do it. We have a proven track record on the delivery of next-generation digital services focussed on empowering citizens to make better health and wellbeing choices, accessing services on their own terms and delivering more of their own care.
