Design and pre-study assessment of a dashboard for presenting self-collected health data from patients with diabetes to clinicians (Preprint)

BACKGROUND Introducing self-collected health data from patients with diabetes into consultation can be beneficial for both patients and clinicians. Patients can be more proactive in their disease management and clinicians can provide more tailored medical services. In the best situation, EHRs should be able to receive self-collected health data in a medical data standard representation such as FHIR from patients systems such as mHealth apps and to display it directly to their users, the clinicians. However, while Norwegian EHRs are working on implementing FHIR, no solution or graphical interface is available today to display self-collected health data. OBJECTIVE The objective of this study was to design and assess a dashboard for displaying relevant self-collected health data from patients with diabetes to clinicians. METHODS The design relied on 1) consulting scientific literature dealing with health data presentation in combination with existing system providing self-collected health data to clinicians, and 2) workshops involving patients, clinicians and researchers to define which in-formation should be available and how it should be displayed. The assessment relied on presenting an instance of the dashboard populated with the data collected from one patient with diabetes type 1 (in-house researcher) face to face with six clinicians. We per-formed a qualitative analysis based on usability, functionality and expectation using responses to questionnaires distributed to the six clinicians at the end of the workshops and collected before the participants left. RESULTS We showed a dashboard permitting clinicians to 1) assess the reliability of self-collected health data, 2) list all collected data among medical calculations and 3) point out medical situations to investigate for improving the situation of the patients. The system uses a combination of tables, graphs and other visual representations to display the relevant information. The assessment showed that the clinicians think that this type of solution will be useful during consultations every day, especially for patients living in remote areas or the ones being technologically interested. CONCLUSIONS Displaying self-collected health data along with their reliability and extracted information can ease the introduction of self-collected health data during consultations with clinicians. The pre-study assessment showed that the system has been very well received by the participants and they were eager to start using it during consultations. The system is currently being tested in a medical trial since No-vember 2018 and the first results concerning its assessment in a real-life situation are expected in the beginning of next year (2020).