Senior Lecturer, Department of Health Systems Management, Guilford Glazer Faculty of Business and Management and Faculty of Health Sciences, Ben Gurion University of the Negev, P.O.B. 653, Beer-Sheva, 8410501, Israel; McMaster Health Forum, McMaster University, 1280 Main Street West, Hamilton, ON, L8S 4L6, Canada; Institute of Health Policy, Management and Evaluation, University of Toronto, 4th Floor, 155 College St, Toronto, ON, M5T 3M6, Canada.
Senior Lecturer, Department of Health Systems Management, Guilford Glazer Faculty of Business and Management and Faculty of Health Sciences, Ben Gurion University of the Negev, P.O.B. 653, Beer-Sheva, 8410501, Israel; Brown School, Washington University in St Louis, 1 Brookings Dr, St. Louis, MO, 63130, United States.
Patient Educ Couns. 2018 Sep;101(9):1708-1711. doi: 10.1016/j.pec.2018.04.005. Epub 2018 Apr 14.
Patients often feel lost when navigating the health care system, and poor care coordination leads to negative patient outcomes, consumes resources and makes diseases more difficult to treat. Patients and citizens have become eager to take health care decision making into their own hands. To this end, solutions have been proposed which assist patients by providing them with more information and enabling them to take a more active role in their care. These include enlisting a patient navigator, consumer engagement, process mapping, decision aids, and clinical pathways. However, as the global penetration of mobile devices approaches 100%, it is timely to update and optimize health system support technologies and information dissemination pathways. There is much room for improvement and health systems are beginning to echo other industries in asking "what do consumers want?" in their applications. We believe that now is the time to address emergent gaps and supplement the irreplaceable human elements of patient navigation with a mobile or computer application. It would be able to automate parts of the process, and consolidate important information, to serve as a broad-reaching, real-time companion for healthcare consumers and their families to accompany them on their journey from diagnosis to follow up.
患者在就医时常常感到困惑，而医疗协调不善会导致不良的患者结局，浪费资源，并使疾病更难治疗。患者和公民渴望自己掌控医疗决策。为此，已经提出了一些解决方案，通过向患者提供更多信息并使他们能够更积极地参与护理来帮助他们。这些方案包括招募患者导航员、消费者参与、流程映射、决策辅助和临床路径。然而，随着移动设备在全球的普及率接近 100%，及时更新和优化医疗系统支持技术和信息传播途径是适时的。仍有很大的改进空间，医疗系统开始效仿其他行业，在其应用程序中询问“消费者想要什么？”我们认为，现在是时候解决新出现的差距，并通过移动或计算机应用程序来补充患者导航中不可或缺的人为因素。它能够实现流程的自动化，并整合重要信息，成为医疗保健消费者及其家人的广泛实时伴侣，陪伴他们从诊断到随访的整个旅程。
