Designing a personal health application for older adults to manage medications

Older adults with multiple chronic conditions are prone to care transitions, such as seeing a new doctor or being discharged after a prolonged hospital stay. These transitions are often uncoordinated and can imperil patients by omitted, duplicative, or contradictory treatment plans. We developed an open source, web-based Personal Health Application (PHA) using an iterative participatory design process that provides older adults and their caregivers the ability to manage their personal health information during care transitions. We report our findings from six user studies that establish the imperative need for interdisciplinary research and collaboration among all stakeholders - patients, caregivers, health professionals, designers, and health informaticians - to create effective PHAs. We conclude with design guidelines that encourage researchers to gradually increase functionality as users become more proficient interacting with the PHA.