#EHRPersonas – blogpost on CCIO site

Here is a post on the CCIO website on the recent EHR Personas workshop organised by eHealthIreland:

 

The HSE’s Chief Information Officer and the Clinical Strategy and Programmes Directorate are currently developing ‘Personas’ and ‘Scenarios’ to support the introduction of Electronic Health Records (EHR). As part of this project, a series of workshops for those working in the health services and also patients/service users was held on January 31^stand February 1^st.

One of the challenges of developing an EHR is capturing the diversity of needs it must address. Even a seemingly straightforward clinical setting will involve multiple interactions with multiple information sources. Contemporary mental health practice is focused on the community, but at the same time acute psychiatric units now co-located in acute general hospitals, and mental health issues very commonly arise simultaneously with general health needs, there is considerable overlap with the hospital system. Mental health services increasingly integrate multiple models of mental health, not only a purely medical one; while simultaneously safe psychiatric practice requires access to laboratory and imaging systems to the same degree as other medical disciplines.

Mental health services are therefore interacting with hugely complex information networks. Capturing all this complexity in a useful form is a considerable challenge. Personas and scenarios allow the expertise of patients and clinicians to be synthesised and for assumptions about what an EHR is for and can do to be challenged.

As a participant in a service provider workshop, I naturally enough was grouped with other mental health professionals. Most of our team were mental health nurses – in the community, delivering therapies and liaising with general hospital staff. We also had representation from pharmacy and administration, and myself as a psychiatrist. Other workshops include the diverse range of health professionals that make up a multidisciplinary community mental health team.
The service user persona was Tom, a 19 year old student from Mayo who has recently started university in Dublin. Tom’s friends notice he is more withdrawn and generally “not himself” and are sufficiently concerned to persuade him to attend the college health services where he sees a GP. There a physical examination, blood work and a urine drug screen are performed. A referral is made via HealthLink to a community mental health team. However a couple of nights later Tom becomes much more distressed and tells his friends he needs to escape from black-coated men following him everywhere. Tom’s friends bring him to the local Emergency Department where he is medically assessed and referred for a psychiatric opinion.

The scenario attempted to address how an EHR would address multiple issues that effect current mental health practice – from communication between primary care and mental health services to the avoiding duplication of investigations and of questioning.

One of the most persistent items of feedback from mental health service users is the initial contact with services involving much repetition of the same questions – often including biographical and demographic data – at a time of distress and anxiety.There is also frequently repetition of investigations and physical examinations, even when these have already been performed.

In our scenario, the situation developed with Tom deciding to move back home to Mayo and re-presenting to his local GP. This brought up a whole range of issues around the interaction between primary care, student health services, the mental health services across different catchment areas and regions. In our group, we discussed how the issue of access to the National Shared Record could play out with various permutations of consent from Tom, and the impact this could have on his care.

The second persona focused on a community mental health nurse, Ann, on her daily routine of calling to service users across a geographically dispersed mixed urban/rural area, engaging with clients at various stages of recovery, and administering treatments such as depot injections of antipsychotic medication and centrally dispensed medication such as clozapine. In our scenario we introduced features typical of remote working in an environment where mobile connections are not always reliable. Features such as the ability to work offline and upload updated records when back online were discussed.

In both service user and clinician scenarios, it became clear that if technology is to improve how health systems work for the benefit of the patient, it is in many ways by becoming invisible, by making the clinical interaction frictionless and about the person at its heart. The need for repeated, intrusive and unnecessary investigations – and questioning – could be reduced, allowing therapeutic interactions to take place unhindered. Both personas, and both scenarios, reinforced for me that the health system must have the service user – such as Tom – at its heart, and the delivery of healthcare is ultimately by people – such as Ann.

At its best, technology can enable this ultimately deeply personal interaction, rather than acting as another barrier, another “system” to be navigated.

Why are doctors so unhappy?

From the UK junior doctor’s strike to survey after survey , there seems to be growing evidence that a doctor’s lot is not a happy one. Or is it not so much a “doctor’s lot” as a “doctor’s nature?”

I’ve been interested in this question (quite apart from the personal relevance!) ever since working on this review for the TLS of various medical biographies. As I wrote:

In the Western world, at least, the medical profession generally enjoys high status. For sociologists, doctors incarnate various forms of power disparities. Medical science and medical technology have made spectacular progress since the Second World War; procedures such as LASIK laser eye surgery, to give just one example, that once would have seemed magical, are now near-routine.

And yet an air of discontent is evident in much of the discourse of modern medicine. Like many others, the medical profession is under question, if not attack, on a range of fronts. Complementary remedies are increasingly popular, often with practitioners as well as patients, despite the advent of evidence-based medicine and numerous books that have discredited their claims to efficacy. A succession of scandals in Britain and elsewhere has undermined public trust in doctors and nurses. Lewis Terman’s classic study of “gifted” individuals, published in 1954, found that physicians tended to feel inferior relative to those of comparable attainment in other fields, and the Grant Study, George Vaillant’s epic survey of adult development, following the Harvard Class of 1944, identified self-doubt as the feature distinguishing physicians from control subjects.

There was somewhat more I wrote originally, but for reasons of space, had to be cut

 

. Much was based on my reading of Myers and Gabbard’s wonderful The Physician as Patient – a book I reviewed some years ago . As I wrote then, Myers and Gabbard illustrate the power of the case vignette, a somewhat neglected form nowadays, and I also wondered about the  self flagellation possibilities of audit (linked I guess to the Imperative Voice one gets so much of in medical journals)

I didn’t write in my 2008 review of one of the points Myers and Gabbard make – based on psychoanalytic literature – about the much-vaunted grandiosity and pomposity of doctors – the “god complex.” In their reading, this (when it occurs) is a defence mechanism against the ultimate power of death against all our efforts. Personally, there are only a handful of doctors I have come across – and at this point I must have come across hundreds in various contexts – who in any way lived up to the “god complex” stereotype.

Are doctors less happy than other citizens? Surveys and so forth can no doubt be adduced to prove the point (though I must admit after the US Presidential Election having an even greater scepticism about ANY survey or poll being used as “evidence”)  and the lived experience of doctors is increasingly one of a beleaguered profession overwhelmed by competing and constant demands. Is this because of specific issues – funding, resources, de-professionalisation – of the contemporary world?  Is it because of a cultural shift from doctor-knows-best to consumerist healthcare? Or is it something deeper and perhaps near-inherent to the kind of person who is drawn to the practice of medicine? Or something deeper and perhaps near-inherent to the practice of medicine itself?

There is, on one level, more discourse about health and healthcare than ever before. On another, there is often a a euphemistic, evasive quality to much of it. So many terms – from “evidence-based” to “patient centered” – have become godterms that conceal the complexity and diversity of healthcare (both complexity and diversity are themselves “godterms”, increasingly, but I use them very deliberately here) and the contending priorities at play.

This is an area ripe for pompous theorising about Society and Culture and so on, and perhaps I have done my share of this already. One final thought: the WHO definition of health is:

a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.

Do you, reader, really believe that? Do you really, when you think of what it is to be healthy, think of”complete social well-being”?  What is “complete physical, mental and social well-being” anyway?

The point is not to denigrate “well being” in some way – or not to recognise the value of a positive rather than negative definition of health. The point is, this  grandiose definition has consequences – underlying not just health policy and practice but how we think about what it means to be healthy, and also what doctors (and nurses, and psychologists, and OTs, and physios, and everyone else with apologies for those left out) are trying to achieve. I would argue that the WHO definition is something out of a kind of worldly messianiac pseudo-religion rather than a workable basis for a human-scale endeavour.