Personal health-sensors and devices are quickly entering the marked, answering the needs of people with diabetes’ self-management. This has led to an increasing amount of patient-gathered health data, which we foresee will be important in meetings between healthcare personnel and patients. Building on the previous FI-STAR project, we address this issue in the current FullFlow project.
Prior to testing an in-house developed system that allows people with diabetes to share their self-gathered data during consultations, we queried healthcare personnel (n=17; 12 GPs, 4 nurses, and 1 nutritionist) about their perceptions of, and suggestions for, the proposed system.
All the healthcare personnel informants reported that they expected the designed system to be useful during consultations. Ten of them gave specific suggestions about how they expected the system to function, including: 1) possibilities for remote consultations; 2) support for keeping track of types of carbohydrates, not only amount; 3) support for keeping track of lipid levels; 4) automatic data transfer from apps, e.g. Strava, and devices, e.g. glucose meters and insulin pens; 5) support for all kinds of mobile phones; 6) integration of this system’s functions with electronic health record systems; 7) highlighting changes since last consultation; 8) transfer of consultation notes and hospital system information into the patients’ app to provide them with tailored recommendations for follow-up at the next consultation.
Healthcare personnel are positive to a system for using patient-gathered data, and they contribute with creative and specific suggestions for how such systems should work.