How to manage chronic illness with a PHR?
A chronic illness isn’t the name of just one illness. It’s a word used to describe a group of health conditions that last a long time. In fact, the root word of chronic is “chronos,” which refers to time.
There are many kinds of chronic illnesses. Some illnesses (like a cold or the chicken pox) only last a short time and go away on their own, but sometimes an illness doesn’t go away. Don’t worry, most chronic illnesses are not contagious – you usually don’t catch them from someone else. But chronic illnesses can be genetic, meaning that parents can pass the tendency to get them on to their children before they are born through genes. If a person has a chronic illness, he needs to take care of his condition for months or years.
A PHR can help adolescents with chronic illnesses to communicate with their providers and others about their health. Personal health applications are designed to help people understand and track their treatments. For people with chronic diseases, their application helps in interpreting a range of relevant health data, illustrates online how their daily behaviors affect their condition and how they feel. It also provides specific recommendations for improving their typical routines.
You can keep track of medications, dosage, refills and routines via a Personal Health Record. Through an interactive Web portal, patients input personalized information on their daily activity level and lifestyle. They then receive customized plans to increase activity levels in ways that are tailored to their daily routines.
Capturing observations from the home and interacting with patients in everyday life helps put patients on their own healthcare monitoring, which is why PHR’s are the key to managing a healthier lifestyle.
