Usage and abandonment of mobile personal health record systems and patient empowerment

Abstract

Mobile personal health record, mPHR, enables patients to see and manage their own health information whenever, wherever they are. Health care providers and technology companies provide mPHR to support patient empowerment. Although many health care service providers provide various mPHR to the patients, many users abandon the mPHR. For example, out of 1760 users of My Chart in My Hand, mPHR made by Asan Medical Center in Korea, 987 users abandoned the application. This study focuses on this phenomenon, scrutinizing what affects the continued usage of mPHR. Based on patient empowerment literature, we classify patient empowerment process and analyze the relationship between patient empowerment process and continued usage of mPHR. We use log record of My Chart in My Hand for data, and use Cox proportional hazard regression model for analysis. In addition, we empirically prove that the usage amount in the next phase is influenced by patient empowerment process. Our findings suggest that when users go through either inter-personal or intra-personal empowerment process more, the probability of abandonment will decrease. While it is natural to use less as users have been using mPHR for longer time period, intra-personal empowerment process moderates the effect. Also, both inter-personal and intra-personal empowerment process in previous phase has positive effect on current usage frequency.