Feasibility Study of a Mobile Digital Personal Health Record for Family- Centered Care Coordination for Children and Youth with Special Healthcare Needs

A Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR)-enabled digital personal health record mobile app has the potential to enhance care coordination for families of children and youth with special healthcare needs and to inform improvements in family-centered care coordination that will be highly impactful for populations of patients with complex health needs across the age spectrum.

Project Details -
Ongoing

Coordinating complex care across multiple providers and services can be stressful and isolating for families of children and youth with special healthcare needs (CYSHCN); thus, better care coordination solutions are needed. Digital personal health records (PHRs) that allow families to securely access, manage, and share their child’s health data across multiple information and electronic health record (EHR) systems are promising solutions. Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR)—an application programming interface (API) standard that represents and exchanges health information—are central to digital PHRs being able to fulfill their promise. Despite their importance, FHIR technologies are not yet widely adopted. The researchers previously collaborated with Boston Children’s Hospital on development of Caremap, a FHIR-enabled digital PHR mobile app that was co-designed with families and clinicians, to coordinate care for CYSHCN. Caremap has been positively reviewed by families in preliminary testing, and this followup research will implement and evaluate the Caremap mobile app in a real-world setting.

The specific aims of the study are as follows:

  • Evaluate the feasibility of a digital PHR mobile application with FHIR-enabled EHR integration to coordinate care for CYSHCN.
  • Identify barriers and facilitators of mobile app implementation via a mixed-methods evaluation.
  • Explore associations between mobile app adoption by families and family-reported outcomes.

The study will enroll 40 families (adult parents/caregivers) of CYSHCN in pediatric primary care clinics to use the digital PHR mobile application as a tool for coordinating their child’s care over a 6-month period. Using a mixed-methods design, researchers will evaluate quantitative feasibility data and qualitative data from semi-structured interviews with families and providers and family stakeholder engagement panels to identify implementation barriers and facilitators. Using pre/post analyses of baseline and 6-month family-reported survey measures, they will explore associations between app adoption and family-reported outcomes.

If successful, the findings will support a future multisite, randomized trial to evaluate the effectiveness of enhanced care coordination with a digital PHR mobile app compared to usual care coordination. Due to similarities in needs between CYSHCN and adults with multiple chronic conditions, the study’s findings will inform improvements in family-centered care coordination that will be highly impactful for complex populations across the age spectrum.