The Uptake and Impact of a Personal Health Record for Patients with Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus in Primary Care A Research Protocol for a Backward and Forward Evaluation

A Personal Health Record (PHR) is a promising technology for improving the quality of chronic disease management. Despite the efforts that have been made in a research project to develop a PHR for patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus in primary care (e-Vita), differences have been reported between the number of registered users in the participating primary practices. To gain insight into the factors that influence the implementation of the PHR into daily health care processes and into the possibilities to improve the content, interviews have been conducted with participating primary practice nurses and other stakeholders in the research project. A first impression of the interviews indicated that in many cases, the low impact of the PHR is due to a lack of information about the purpose, content and use of the system. Keywords-component: personal health record; type 2 diabetes mellitus; implementation; interviews, contextual inquiry; value specification; summative evaluation