CONSUMER PERSPECTIVES AND PERSONA CHARACTERISTICS ASSOCIATED WITH PERSONAL ELECTRONIC HEALTH RECORDS USE: AUSTRALIAN MY HEALTH RECORD A CONTEXTUAL STUDY

INTRODUCTION:

Personal electronic health records (PEHR) are playing an important role in the provision of care and have been widely implemented including in the USA, Canada, Denmark and Australia. By March 2022 there were a total of 23.2 million My Health Record accounts in Australia which has a population of 26,439 million. However, it is unclear how people are using their own MyHR.

Previously published studies have looked at the relationship between the persona of individuals and usage of internet services (Roos and Kazemi, 2021). A persona is defined as a fictional person created from data to represent a type that uses, or might use, a product (Jung et al., 2017). However, details of personas of consumers who engage with their health information in an online platform remains inconsistent and largely unknown (Weaver et al., 2009).

AIM: 

To explore and understand the perspectives and persona characteristics of consumers associated with MyHR activity who reside within the Nepean Blue Mountains area, NSW Australia.

METHOD:

Residents of Nepean Blue Mountains area, NSW were invited to participate in an anonymous online survey via a snowball approach.

Principle Component Analysis (PCA) was used to minimize correlations between the inputs used for the clustering. This analysis was selected as the primary purpose to explain variability in observed and correlated components and reduce these into smaller sub-sets (factors) for further analysis (clustering).

RESULTS:

Persona Charateristics (segments)

Persona 1 - This persona represents people aged 35 years and over who frequently use the internet but do not use health apps, they rate their health status as poor.

Persona 2 - This persona represents people in the age group 45 years and under who use the internet daily, uses health apps and rate their own health as fair to OK. 

Persona 3 - This persona represents people over the age of 25 who use health apps daily and rate themselves as very healthy.

Persona 4 - This persona represents people over the age of 45 years who infrequently use the internet, do not use health apps and rate their health as fair to OK. 

Persona 5 - This persona represents people over the age of 50 years who infrequently use the internet, do not use health apps, rate themselves as very healthy and have completed university level education.

Pesona 6 - This persona represents university level educated people who are over the age of 35 years who consider their health to be fair to OK and use the internet daily and health apps. 

Persona 7 - This persona represents people who are over the age of 45 years who infrequently uses the internet and do not use health apps combined with rating their health as poor.

CONCLUSION:

This study identified that a lack of awareness was present, and that participants held concerns in relation to their privacy. Strategies to increase awareness and to reduce concerns regarding privacy issues will need to be employed to increase the use of MyHR. Consumers perceived that a MyHR is beneficial, but access to and satisfaction of the system remains low. Future product design enhancements for MyHR, should consider the use of personas and co-design to help better meet the expectations and needs of consumers to fully release the benefits of MyHR.

To date the Australian government has invested close to $2 billion into MyHR (Mullins et al., 2022). Given the significant investment size, there is an opportunity for further research using consumer personas and working with consumers to better understand what improvements are needed to increase usage and satisfaction of the consumer experience to engage with their MyHR moving forward.