Rationalizing personal health management (PHM) policy: Identifying health IT use patterns via observations of daily living (ODLs) data

Objectives Managing personal health information is mainly dependent upon individual users’ adoption and use of new health technology. Despite the increasing popularity of mobile health apps, recent endeavors of self-health management have been somewhat limited to fitness management whose apps have selective features and capabilities. Under this context, it raises a question as to whether health consumers are capable of adopting and utilizing mobile health apps with varying features and capabilities in order to manage both medical and fitness health information. Methods Borrowing from a theoretical lens of observations of daily living (ODLs), the authors posit that if individual health consumers can record their daily activities with both health and non-health related mobile IT, such self-tracking information can then serve as an evaluation tool for measuring their future capabilities of new health IT adoption. To explore the phenomenon, we administered an online survey to collect technology-related ODL data from 226 international health consumers with known ODL survey items. Results By applying confirmatory factor analysis and K-means cluster analysis, we found health consumers’ use of social and finance-related technology are closely linked to the use of mobile health technology in their daily living. Moreover, health consumers who actively use all three technologies (i.e., social, financial and health technologies) tend to have affinitive perceptions toward health management outcomes. Conclusion The findings of this study can inform health policymakers to vie for more effective mobile health technology in rationalizing personal health management (PHM) policy.