Off-campus Michigan Tech users: To download campus access theses or dissertations, please use the following button to log in with your Michigan Tech ID and password: log in to proxy server

Non-Michigan Tech users: Please talk to your librarian about requesting this thesis or dissertation through interlibrary loan.

Date of Award

2018

Document Type

Campus Access Master's Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science in Medical Informatics (MS)

Administrative Home Department

School of Technology

Advisor 1

Guy Hembroff

Committee Member 1

Donald Peck

Committee Member 2

Euguene Levin

Abstract

Individuals diagnosed with comorbidity represent a growing proportion of population worldwide. Escalating disease burden due to chronic clinical conditions often result in emotional distress, thereby, giving rise to a behavioral ailment. Patients with complex comorbidity find it difficult to establish communication with different health care providers due to lack of continuity of information. Their ability to recognize personal, environmental, social and knowledge-based barriers is important to self-management of diagnosed conditions. Lack of quality oriented proactive health care delivery system design exists due to unavailability of evidence based decision support involving self-management strategies in care delivery. Mobile health applications (mHealth apps) and wearable technology have a potential to improve health outcomes by helping high-need, high-cost populations manage comorbid conditions. They enable remote patient monitoring and are appropriate in understanding patient compliance to treatment. mHealth advances self-management and active engagement in refining and achieving positive health status. Focusing primarily on patients, mHealth allows optimization of care plans. It enables health care providers with a mechanism to coordinate effective confidentiality and security protocols based patient communication, evidence-based decision support and offer patient-centered high quality care. This study aims at improving health outcomes among patients diagnosed with both chronic clinical illnesses and depression through the development of an mHealth application. The application detects and reports problematic patterns in treatment adherence through daily emotional check-ins and medication reconciliation. Daily check-ins administered using patient health questionnaire –9 (PHQ-9): a standard depression-screening instrument, measure severity of depression on daily basis and identify presence of suicidal ideation. Medication reconciliation through mHealth application includes provision for adding medications, dosages, intake alerts and intake logs. The objective is to promote patient engagement in self-care and treatment adherence along with evaluating potential for use by health care providers to monitor patient progress towards general well-being.

Download

Share

COinS