Improving Health Care Quality and Reducing Health Disparities: The Impact of Consumer Empowerment and Health Information Technology

In this presentation, we will discuss the implications of health information technology on patient provider communication, consumer empowerment for vulnerable populations including racial/ethnic minorities, elderly persons, and persons with chronic illnesses.

The proceedings from 2 national, pre-conferences entitled: New Frontiers in Health Disparities Research: Intersections of Consumer Empowerment and Health Information Technology (HIT) will be presented. Study results from three papers on health disparities and HIT will be presented along with a unifying theorectical framework that is based on the Andersen Behavioral Model and the Health Belief Model. The data sources for the analyses include the Community Tracking Study, The Health Information National Trends Survey, and the Medicare Current Beneficiary Survey.

The implications for health insurance plans, physician practices, and health care consumer/patient behavior are discussed particularly with respect to clinical practice operations and system-wide quality improvement procedures. These issues are applied to the topic of reducing health disparities by examining improved data collection of patient reported quality measures using novel HIT interfaces, the use of HIT in assessing patient preferences for health care decisions, the use of HIT to improve patient-provider communication especially for non-English speakers, and the patterns of health information seeking behaviors of vulnerable populations (a marker of consumer empowerment).