Profiles of eHealth Adoption in Persons with Multiple Sclerosis and Their Caregivers

Abstract

(1) Background: Persons with multiple sclerosis (pwMS) are often characterized as ideal adopters of new digital healthcare trends, but it is worth thinking about whether and which pwMS will be targeted and served by a particular eHealth service like a patient portal. With our study, we wanted to explore needs and barriers for subgroups of pwMS and their caregivers when interacting with eHealth services in care and daily living. (2) Methods: This study comprises results from two surveys: one collecting data from pwMS and their relatives (as informal caregivers) and another one providing information on the opinions and attitudes of healthcare professionals (HCPs). Data were analyzed descriptively and via generalized linear models. (3) Results: 185 pwMS, 25 informal caregivers, and 24 HCPs in the field of MS participated. Nine out of ten pwMS used information technology on a daily base. Individual impairments like in vision and cognition resulted in individual needs like the desire to actively monitor their disease course or communicate with their physician in person. HCPs reported that a complete medication overview, additional medication information, overview of future visits and a reminder of medication intake would be very helpful eHealth features for pwMS, while they themselves preferred features organizing and enriching future visits. (4) Conclusions: A closer look at the various profiles of eHealth adoption in pwMS and their caregivers indicated that there is a broad and robust enthusiasm across several subgroups that does not exclude anyone in general, but constitutes specific areas of interest. For pwMS, the focus was on eHealth services that connect previously collected information and make them easily accessible and understandable.

A Novel Digital Care Management Platform to Monitor Clinical and Subclinical Disease Activity in Multiple Sclerosis

“…The features that PwMS thought they would actually use were symptom logging, performing tests/PROs, treatment overviews and a knowledge center were found to be most popular (84–91%). This is in line with recent research indicating a patient demand for medication schedules and reminders [ 13 ]. This study also indicated a strong interest for visit overviews, which has been implemented into ico mpanion ’s calendar and visit preparation feature recently.…”

“…In order to gain insight into the PwMS' perspective on digital telemonitoring solutions, we carried out a survey which was answered by 45 PwMS of which the larger part (75.2%) indicated to see themselves as digitally literate. Only one patient (2.2%) indicated to have a negative attitude towards using an app to monitor their disease course, which is in line with previous reports about positive attitudes of PwMS [13].…”

“…There is great promise in implementing digital health solutions to standardize MS care, as they can improve efficiency and workflow, and complement clinical expertise. A recent study indicated healthcare professionals’ (HCPs) most crucial problems in MS disease management to be the lack of forwarding of information by the patient, the need for the patient to visit on site for inquiries and poor reachability of PwMS, for which digital telemonitoring tools can be a solution [ 13 ].…”

Healthcare providers’ readiness for electronic health record adoption: a cross-sectional study during pre-implementation phase

“…The main hindering factors that influence the readiness of healthcare professionals in the implementation of an EHR are: sex [50,68], age [50,[69][70][71], knowledge [30,45,50,[72][73][74][75], attitude [74,76,77], awareness [78,79], innovativeness [75], training [63,64,80], computer literacy [50,63,72,74], workload [81], management support [30,82], experience [40,44,46,57,63,64,72,[83][84][85][86], self-efficacy [41,68,87], perceived benefit [30,77,88,89], computer use, and internet access [90].…”

Digital Innovation in Multiple Sclerosis Management

“…Haase et al continued their investigation of active stakeholders in the process of digital MS management in a multi-survey study [ 1 ]. They took a close look at the attitudes, needs, and behaviors of pwMS, as well as at their relatives and caregivers regarding electronically assisted disease management.…”