Health care consumers views on Health IT

Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
Consumer Engagement in Developing Electronic Health Information Systems
Final report. Based on 20 focus groups regionally and socially mixed with 4 in Spanish
extract:
"Results of the focus groups suggest that participants were optimistic that health IT would benefit health care quality. They thought that computers may add efficiency to health care and reduce medical errors, such as those associated with illegible handwriting. However, some participants were concerned that health IT might make providers more impersonal, devoting more attention to the computer screen and less to the patient.
A large proportion of the participants initially thought that health care consumers should not help in determining how health IT was designed and used. They stated that health IT was the domain of experts in medicine and computers. They felt that health care consumers like themselves lacked the knowledge needed to have a role in health IT matters. However, upon further discussion, the participants tended to feel that they needed to have a say about health IT in order to protect the privacy and security of their medical information."