Supporting Patient and Provider Management of Chronic Pain with PDA Applications Linked to Personal Health Records

University of Massachusetts Medical School

Roger Luckmann, M.D., M.P.H
Department of Family Medicine and Community Health
University of Massachusetts Medical School, Worcester, MA
Team Biographies

What Was Accomplished

The University of Massachusetts Medical School team designed a personal health application (PHA) to help patients document their daily pain experiences and physical activities. The application, an electronic diary, supports collection of self-reported pain and activity data on a handheld device, and provides both patients and their health care providers with a menu of options for analyzing and displaying this data. A touch screen device facilitates rapid completion of diary entries throughout the day. Response options to diary queries are customized to include only responses relevant to an individual user. The team engaged target patients through focus groups to obtain input on content, function, UI design and hardware preferences. They field tested a working prototype to assess ease-of-use and feasibility of data collection every 2 hours throughout the day. The team evaluated the feasibility of using existing web services for accessing, analyzing and displaying pain and activity data in the Common Platform database.

• Background Information
• Project Poster

Work Products
To download any of these documents, view Work Products Table.

• Storyboard/Algorithms - Electronic Pain and Activity Diary application.
  
  
• Presentation - Narrated presentation featuring the target audience of the application
  
  
• PowerPoint Summary - Electronic Pain and Activity Diary application summary, June, 2008