INFO-B 644 Consumer Health Informatics
3 credits
- Prerequisite(s): None
- Delivery: Online
Description
Recent legislation appears to create new incentives for consumer health initiatives. Are we in the midst of a healthcare revolution where the consumer will play an expanded, empowered, or at least more fully engaged role in their own health care, or is it just an incremental step bogged down by special interests that handicaps the patient as a consumer when compared to almost every other industry? However you answer that question, what will be the implications for health IT professionals particularly over the next 3 years? These are the questions we will explore in this class.
Topics include:
- Models for the delivery of consumer health information over different platforms
- Patient-driven social-media-based models for sharing information, peer support, research and policy advocacy
- Synchronous consumer health technologies such as telehealth video conferencing
- Asynchronous consumer health technologies, such as evidence-based applications which serve as either a complement to or an extension of a live encounter with a clinician
- Passive consumer health, such as remote patient monitoring
- Technology solutions that attempt to address diversity, equity and inclusion
- Technology solutions that extend beyond traditional physical and mental health to include social determinants of health
The final project will be to write an executive summary and present a short pitch to a venture capitalist or grant funding agency (such as the NIH or SAMHSA) for the development of, or production, distribution and support for, a new consumer health technology. Through this, students will be able to:
- Evaluate the phrase “consumer health.” Know how and why consumer health should or should not be distinct from all other healthcare and healthcare IT, including how consumer health relates to traditional EHR systems.
- Understand the history of incentives and barriers to the development of consumer health technologies. Know how consumer health has evolved compared to consumer applications in other industries.
- Understand the range of technologies that fall within consumer health, and where they are in their development and adoption.
- Understand how recent regulations and government requirements shape the future of consumer health and create or hinder opportunities and how the political landscape determines the “runway” for development of consumer health technologies particularly over the next three years.
- Know how payers influence and set priorities for consumer health innovation
- Be familiar with and understand the present shift towards value-based, risk sharing payment models for providers that may also drive increased accountability for consumers/patients, and thereby drive a whole new generation of consumer health innovation
- Gain an understanding of how to evaluate the market potential, cost and risk associated with a new consumer health innovation.
- Analyze the challenges of quantifying or measuring consumer health technologies, particularly the non-financial benefits (such as consumer satisfaction or even simply improved health)
- Understand how to build an “Executive Summary” for presentation either to investors (e.g. venture capitalists) or to support a grant application
Policies and Procedures
Please be aware of the following linked policies and procedures. Note that in individual courses instructors will have stipulations specific to their course.