Creating a place for caregivers in personal health: the iHealthSpace copilot program and diabetes care.

BACKGROUND As America's baby boom generation reaches retirement, the number of elders, and, in turn, the number of lay individuals who support them, will continue to increase. With the important services caregivers provide, it is critical that we recognize and provide assistance to the informal caregivers who play this important role in our society. The network of support provisioned by relatives, partners, friends, and neighbors suggests that the dyadic, unidirectional caregiver-care recipient relationship assumed by caregiver research so far and by resources deployed to assist caregivers may be insufficient to ascertain and meet the needs of the care community. METHODS In this article, we describe the extension of a Web-based personal health record system, iHealthSpace, for explicitly and openly incorporating caregivers into the care community. RESULTS Using this portal, a set of business rules was implemented to support the creation of custodial accounts. These business rules will be used to create modules that support diabetes care in an adult population. CONCLUSIONS We successfully extended an existing patient portal to accommodate the creation of custodial accounts. We will use this portal to assess the impact of custodial access in the care of older patients with diabetes.