With the passage of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, health care providers are likely to adopt health information technology (health IT) at an accelerating pace in the next several years. This expansion in health IT is widely expected to bring improvements in health care quality and efficiency, and possibly some new concerns, especially about privacy and security. Health care consumers may therefore want to have a role in determining how health IT is designed and used. The purpose of this project was to explore the views of health care consumers toward that role. The principal goals of the project were as follows:
• To gain in-depth understanding of health care consumers’ awareness, beliefs, perceptions, and fears concerning health IT.
• To learn how consumers may wish to be engaged in the development of health IT, and at what point they should be engaged.
• To contribute to future AHRQ research initiatives with respect to consumers and health IT.
A total of 20 focus groups were conducted. Because the rate of health IT adoption varies across the country, four groups were conducted in each of five geographic regions of the United States: the Mid-Atlantic, the West, the Midwest, the South, and the Northeast. Most of the groups were homogeneous with regard to HMO membership or non-membership, and frequent or infrequent visits to health care providers. Some participants in several of the groups lacked health insurance. Four of the groups were conducted in Spanish. Two of the groups were held in rural, medically underserved areas. In this way, the groups were designed to study opinions from diverse segments of the U.S. population.
Report
AHRQ, July 2009
