Patient self-management tools

Original Editor - User Name

Top Contributors - Mila Andreew  

Introduction

With the need for people to be able to get efficient, less costly and customized solutions, patient self-management has become a priority in health. In order to achieve this goal, tools have emerged within the healthcare system to try and open new perspectives regarding one’s implication into one's own health.

For the NHS, self-management is described as the “ways that health and care services encourage, support and empower people to manage their ongoing physical and mental health conditions themselves.” In developed countries, health is no longer seen as a restrained physical condition, but as a bigger condition involving mental well-being, social connections and any other meaningful event that one perceives as impactful.

Furthermore, researches have shown how implication in health could play a huge role in the motivation, response and therefore outcome of the treatment.It is however to be noted that the careful selection of the tool used, plays a predominant role in the potential effect on treatment.

Due to they long term costs and effect on peoples life, most researches have been based on the self-management of chronic diseases such as diabetes and hypertension. With new technologies arising, this will hopefully open up the room for more sectors, especially in prevention.

Mhealth in patient-self management

Mhealth (short for mobile health) is often defined as the use of digital devices such as smartphones and tablets into the health sector. Used mainly to support practitioners into the follow-up of patients, it has started to emerge as more customized solutions for collaborative, and even autonomous, personal fitness and health trackers.

Advantages to using patient self-management tools

Though their relative novelty, patient self-management tools have shown to being a good alternative to certain in facility care. Those are some reasons why :

• They have shown to be leading to less risks then conventional care even on low literacy patient.
• They create a strong implication of patient into owns health, leading to a stronger motivation.
• They enable a more precise health follow-up for practitioners in response to the patient's feedbacks ( ex : daily glucose level).

Barriers to using patient self-management tools

On the other hand, due to the new approach they bring to healthcare as well as the few current researches that are available, patient self-management tools should be used carefully. Some barriers that can occur are :

• Patient lack of communication and feedback making the management hard to assess for the health professional.
• The lack of access to internet in some part of the world such as southern and eastern Asia, and in Africa.
• Patient's low health literacy, even in richer countries. Moreover, this low health literacy seems to corroborate with the need of seeking more often health services help.