Instead of a Weapon For Health Care Improvement, Monitoring Becomes Another Battleground

If you wax enthusiastic about “patient engagement,” or work with health and fitness devices, or want to derive useful data from patient monitoring in the field, or–basically–read this blog for any reason at all, you should check out a recent study in the Journal of Medical Internet Research. It warns about psychological and logistical factors that trip us up when we try to get patients to monitor their vital signs.

The paper has a catchier title than most: “You Get Reminded You’re a Sick Person”: Personal Data Tracking and Patients With Multiple Chronic Conditions (citation: J Med Internet Res 2015;17(8):e202). The paper summarizes results of a qualitative study, focused not on the purposes or benefits of monitoring, but on how patients react to it. The messages from the patients cited are pretty eye-opening.

Doctors and public health officials know very well that most people with chronic conditions suffer from more than one. Just thinking about their meds, visits to the clinic, bills to pay, and the ways the conditions constrain their lives is more than enough effort for most of the patients. And yet on top of that we pile glucose readings, weighings, diet logs, and other measures with joyful assurances that they will lead to improvement in the patients’ lives...