Patient Acceptance Of Monitoring: Followup Info From Intel's Health Systems Research Lab

07-31-2006 | Categories:

Monitoring

In the preceding post, Patient Acceptance Of Monitoring , I followed a discussion of the potential benefits of electronic monitoring of compliance with the comment that “Because the article provides no details of the research referenced in this excerpt, it begs the question of what proportion of the patient population would find such monitoring acceptable under which conditions.”

With that comment in mind, I contacted Stephen Agritelley, the Director of Intel’s Health Systems Research Lab, who was quoted in the original article.¹

The pertinent portion of my message read
Because no details of that market research are given, some important questions vis-à-vis patient compliance are unanswered. (For example, what proportion of the patient population would find such monitoring acceptable under which conditions? Do different segments of the patient populations respond positively to different conditions?)

Those unanswered queries lead into my requests:
1. Is the market research referenced available and, if so, could I obtain a copy?
2. If the research is unavailable because it is proprietary, could you characterize it in broad terms (e.g., was the data derived from focus groups, interviews, surveys, etc; how many patients were involved; what were the basic criteria for determining if a patients found the monitoring acceptable; what proportion of the patient population found monitoring acceptable, … )?

Mr. Agritelley’s prompt reply follows:

We did not derive this conclusion from market research per se, but from primary investigative research we implement in the field. As we have gone into participants homes and apartments, installed sensor nets and applications built on top of sensor nets, we gauge people’s acceptance both directly from asking them questions as well as in a derivative fashion. I don’t have a report I can send you that can claims “70 out of 100 people think xyz…” I can tell you that our findings point to the fact that while folks are monitored and if they gain some direct feedback from the system that is helpful to them, they are more likely to accept the system and have less concerns about privacy.