Observations of Daily Living (ODLs) and Patient Engagement

By Julie Murchinson. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation-funded program, Project HealthDesign, is pursuing the identification, interpretation and integration of observations of daily living (ODLs). As defined by Project HealthDesign, ODLs are sensations, feelings-thoughts-attitudes, and behaviors that occur in the course of everyday life – such as sleep patterns, diet, exercise levels, pain episodes, and mood – that are not typically part of one’s clinical record, but are critical to managing an individual’s health and guiding their treatment.
During the recent Project HealthDesign workshop, I was struck by the question of what ODLs have the potential to do to engage patients in their health. Will ODLs be the patient’s true representation of issues they own and manage as part of their health or will they be factoids about patients that doctors use but patients don’t truly own? Will ODLs management come naturally or will managing them be an arduous task for the unfortunate individuals who may “need” to manage them? Will doctors be able to synthesize ODLs into clinical practice or will they be too overwhelmed to incorporate another set of information they may not know how to handle or not be remimbursed to pay attention to? Will ODLs evolve with medical research such that they will be taken into consideration as part of future discovery or will ODLs always be an afterthought left to discovery at the point of care? Much remains unknown about the fate of ODLs, but ...

Source: Disruptive Women in Health Care - September 10, 2018 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: dw at disruptivewomen.net Tags: Uncategorized Source Type: blogs