抄録
Patients’ access to and use of personal health data are important aspects of patient care, which could result in greater patient empowerment and would also contribute to the overall improvement in health outcomes. Given the limitations of the existing health records, such doctor-patient information sharing with proper data partition can lead the patients to misconstrue doctors’ diagnostic and therapeutic decisions. Mental health introduces additional challenges, namely issues concerning privacy and risks associated with providing patients with access to sensitive evaluative information. In particular, adolescent patients’ access to their mental health records (MHRs) raises more concerns about the appropriateness of allowing the patients to view their complete medical part of records. We propose a formative research design framework that has implications for developing information architecture (IA) for improving the comprehensibility of patient health records, in the context of adolescent depression, such that patients can access “appropriate” versions of their records. Such an empirical framework based on cognitive methods and consumer health informatics will help in abstracting culturally sensitive health information from physicians’ versions of patients’ MHRs and can aid in thoughtful design of patient health records. This approach can reduce the probability of misinterpretations caused by the information embodied in MHRs by providing patients with access to an alternative version of their own MHRs, which can be accessed by their physicians.
