How to Represent the Patient Voice in the Electronic Health Record?

Abstract

There is an agreement among patients, professionals, as well as leaders, and governance that person-centered care (PCC) is central to care quality. PCC care is a sharing of power to ensure that the answer to: “What matters to you?” drives care decisions. Thus, the patient voice needs to be represented in the EHR to support both patients and professionals in the shared decision-making process and enable PCC. The aim of this paper is therefore to investigate how to represent the patient voice in an EHR. This was a qualitative study of a co-design process with six patient-partners and a team of healthcare personnel. The result of the process was a template for the information needed to represent the patients’ voice in the EHR based on three questions: “What is important for you right now?”. “What matters to you in your life?”. “What do you want your care team to know about your history?”.