At the Connected Health Symposium last week I attended a session entitled “Listening in the Moment: Project HealthDesign Opens the Window on the Every-day Lives of Patients” by leading healthcare informaticist Patricia Flatley Brennan, RN, PhD (@pattifbrennan). She presented information collected by Project HealthDesign with regard to the unstructured data patients collect about their health. These are called Observations of Daily Living, and are defined as follows:
Observations of Daily Living (ODL): Cues patients use to monitor their health. These include:
- Can I sing through the entire Sunday hymnal?
- How many stairs can I climb before I get winded?
- Can I keep up with the kids?
- Just how well are my skinny jeans fitting these days?
In the wake of accountable care and the movement towards population health management, the focus has turned to how we invite patients into the care model. How do we use the important pieces of information that patients collect every day to make the care of both individuals and populations better?
As many in the health field will reckon, there are no SNOMED codes that track the ODLs that patients collect. However, these ODLs would ultimately be very valuable during the course of treatment. So, how do we bring these pieces of important data into the patient record and, in turn, into the care model? In my opinion, this is foremost connected to the Big Data discussions that surround ACO and population health. However, I’ll excited to learn more over time with regard to how ODLs could potentially become more structured pieces of data collected by patients, through mobile devices, and fully incorporated into the care model.
