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Consumer Healthcare Informatics in the COVID-19 Era

Chi N. Nguyen

Health Care Informatics, University of San Diego

HCIN 615 Advanced Health Care Analysis

Instructor: Dr. Razel Milo

March 21, 2021

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Consumer Healthcare Informatics in the COVID-19 Era

For long, health care has been the playground for providers, healthcare organizations,

insurance payers, and regulators. Patients only initiate their healthcare demands and let these big

players decide their health outcomes and payments. Though this traditional healthcare model is

still prevalent in the United States, new care delivery approaches have been evolving

significantly since the advances of technology. Given the escalating costs, aging populations, and

growth in chronic disease, hospitals are not the sole place for medical care anymore

(Wickramasinghe, 2019). Patient care can be accommodated from private resident homes and

outpatient facilities. Value-based care model promotes prevention of illness and outcome

optimization by participation of both patients and providers from early on, rather than fixing the

issues only when they come (Wickramasinghe, 2019). Patients’ behaviors are switching from

passive participation to active self-management (Wickramasinghe, 2019). Especially, the

unanticipated advent of COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020 has drastically boosted these patient-

centered demands. Patients now expect convenience, personalized care, and share decision-

making duty with their providers regarding their own health (Deloitte, 2019).

As a result, the study of consumer healthcare informatics became important in order to

develop and implement necessary Internet-based and computerized applications for patients to

access information (Demiris, 2016). Consumer-centric technology has introduced many tools

including telehealth, home monitoring, Personal Health Records (PHR), consumer genomics, and

precision medicine (Demiris, 2016).

This paper will review and discuss the development of these consumer health informatics

models, their advantages and challenges, and the future opportunities for them to innovate in the

COVID-19 era.
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Literature Review

A literature review was performed on articles published within the last 5 years in

databases such as Direct Science, IEEE, Nature, and Google Scholar. To explore studies on the

benefits of using consumer health informatics to contain disease outbreak such as COVID-19,

the following keywords were used: COVID-19, coronavirus, self-reported symptoms, contact

tracing, remote monitoring, consumer health informatics.

One form of consumer health informatics collected to monitor the spread of the outbreak

since the very beginning was contact tracing. The common method to contain the virus diffusion

is to identify and trace their previous contacts to selectively isolate the likely infected individuals

(Hernandez-Orallo et al., 2020, p. 99088). These prior contacts can be traced using mobile

devices with communication technologies such as GPS, cellular networks, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth.

A study by Hernandez-Orallo et al. (2020, p. 99088) evaluated the impact of contact tracing

precision on the spread and control of infectious diseases. The results showed that accurate

contact tracing technologies have great impact on the social and economic cost of quarantine. In

order to be effective, it is important to trace the contacts quickly, use precise technologies, and

have more than 80% of the population with mobile devices. Even though the results deemed

ineffective during the first outbreak of the virus given these harsh requirements, it was expected

to be extremely helpful in later waves of the pandemic when a portion of the population have

gained immunity.

Quer et al. (2020, p. 74), on the other hand, conducted a research on physiological

measures captured by smartwatches and activity trackers to detect coronavirus. They found out

that these biometric changes can significantly improve the distinction between symptomatic

individuals with and without a diagnosis of COVID-19 beyond symptoms alone (Quer et al.,
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2020, p. 74). As more types of personal sensor data are collected, Quer et al. (2020) suspected it

would potentially improve and enable the identification of individuals without symptoms. A

polished predictive model could enable detection of high-risk individuals and, in combination

with contact tracing apps, identify positive cases more in advance (Quer et al., 2020, p. 74).

These results also suggested that sensor data has the potential to enhance our ability to identify a

cluster before more spread could occur. This passive monitoring strategy may be complementary

to virus testing, which is generally a one-off (Quer et al., 2020, p. 74).

Since the national intensive care unit (ICU) occupancy has been staying at or near full for

critical cases, majority of the COVID-19 infected patients are in self-isolation at home

(Massaroni et al., 2020). Consumer health informatics became undeniably important to the

government and healthcare institutions to monitor the population on a large scale. The

respiratory rate (RR) is a critical sign for pneumonia diagnosis that can be recorded accurately

using built-in cameras, microphones, and wearable sensors (Massaroni et al., 2020). These

technologies could facilitate healthcare assistance for self-isolated COVID-19 patients as well as

for other patients with restricted access to medical services in this time of crisis. The

improvement of remote patient monitoring would provide timely and cost-effective healthcare,

and the reduced burden on brick and mortar hospitals would decrease the risk of infection and

virus transmission (Massaroni et al., 2020).

Lastly, Miner et al. (2020) investigated the use of collecting consumers’ personal data

with Artificial Intelligence (AI) chatbot especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. Both

individuals and institutions want to know the information where infections are spreading.

However, Miner et al. (2020) pointed out the challenge with under-reporting of individuals’

symptoms due to fear of personal responsibility and life chaos. It was highlighted that chatbots
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may be uniquely suitable for symptom screening in a pandemic because people are more willing

to disclose sensitive personal health data to a chatbot than to a human (Miner et al., 2020).

Chatbots make it more accessible for individuals to exchange accurate information with

authorized public health agencies.

References

Deloitte. (2019). 2020 global health care outlook. Retrieved from

https://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/za/Documents/life-sciences-health-

care/za-2020-global-health-care-outlook.pdf

Demiris. (2016). Consumer Health Informatics: Past, Present, and Future of a Rapidly Evolving

Domain. Yearbook of medical informatics, Suppl 1(Suppl 1), S42–S47.

https://doi.org/10.15265/IYS-2016-s005

Hernandez-Orallo, E., Manzoni, P., Calafate, C. T., & Cano, J.-C. (2020). Evaluating How

Smartphone Contact Tracing Technology Can Reduce the Spread of Infectious Diseases:

The Case of COVID-19. IEEE Access, 8, 99083–99097.

https://doi.org/10.1109/access.2020.2998042

Massaroni, C., Nicolò, A., Schena, E., & Sacchetti, M. (2020). Remote Respiratory Monitoring

in the Time of COVID-19. Frontiers in Physiology, 11.

https://doi.org/10.3389/fphys.2020.00635
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Miner, A. S., Laranjo, L., & Kocaballi, A. B. (2020). Chatbots in the fight against the COVID-19

pandemic. Npj Digital Medicine, 3(1), 1. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41746-020-0280-0

Quer, G., Radin, J. M., Gadaleta, M., Baca-Motes, K., Ariniello, L., Ramos, E., Kheterpal, V.,

Topol, E. J., & Steinhubl, S. R. (2020). Wearable sensor data and self-reported symptoms

for COVID-19 detection. Nature Medicine, 27(1), 73–77. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-

020-1123-x

Wickramasinghe. (2019). Essential Considerations for Successful Consumer Health Informatics

Solutions. Yearbook of medical informatics, 28(1), 158–164.

https://doi.org/10.1055/s-0039-1677909