Apomediation and the Affordable Care Act
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Abstract
The proliferation of online health information has been supported by the development of search tools helping consumers navigate this growing body of content. However, recent surveys suggest that consumers increasingly get lost amidst vast amounts of irrelevant information, eventually abandoning their search. Despite increased online information, under-utilization of available social services by low-income persons remains an on-going concern, driven in part by lack of centralized and personalized information.
The Affordable Care Act promises a dramatic expansion of available care and prevention services to be enacted incrementally over a four-year period. Provisions include prohibiting insurers from charging co-payments or deductibles for Level A or Level B preventive care screenings, broadening Medicaid eligibility, and creating temporary high-risk insurance pools for adults with pre-existing conditions. While the newly redesigned healthcare.gov has made substantial progress towards making consumer health information transparent and usable, much of the information is still spread across multiple web pages requiring users to sift through many pages of policy text and determine for themselves what information applies to them.
Seeing as the impact of proposed health care expansions will only be as great as their reach and utilization, we offer here a solution to this information bottleneck leveraging web 2.0 apomediation theory to create a personalized web platform able to automatically suggest free services and health screenings individuals may be eligible for under the Affordable Care Act. The platform we have built relies on sleek design and not volume of content to engage users. Instead of querying users on their medial history and insurance information, we distill our intake survey into five simple demographic questions. Current offerings by the US Preventive Services Task Force for this purpose are instead tailored for physicians, suffused with medical language and require medical knowledge to interpret.
Drawing upon strategies shown to be successful in engaging users, our platform additionally integrates social media and task-completion functionalities. Social incentives are powerful levers by which to motivate patients to modify health behaviors and have similar applicability in promoting the completion of preventive health screens. To provide consumers with discrete outputs, we have built in functionality to allow for immediate identification of local physicians with whom one can schedule appointments with planned extension into immediate online appointment booking.
Apomediation theory has widespread applicability to public health beyond the Affordable Care Act. Information about state and local services are spread across difficult to identify offices and resource databases. Several non-profit clearinghouses already exist such as Single Stop USA that collate information about social services for low-income individuals. Incorporating web 2.0 strategies, including personalization, intelligent interaction and social incentives represent the next steps to guiding consumers to relevant resources. Obama’s stated commitment to expanding internet access in rural and low-income communities further suggests relevance of such strategy. The wealth of publicly-available health data provided through websites such as healthindicators.gov, opendata.gov, healthdata.gov, and the IOM Health Data Initiative have potential to further support efforts in this area.
The Affordable Care Act promises a dramatic expansion of available care and prevention services to be enacted incrementally over a four-year period. Provisions include prohibiting insurers from charging co-payments or deductibles for Level A or Level B preventive care screenings, broadening Medicaid eligibility, and creating temporary high-risk insurance pools for adults with pre-existing conditions. While the newly redesigned healthcare.gov has made substantial progress towards making consumer health information transparent and usable, much of the information is still spread across multiple web pages requiring users to sift through many pages of policy text and determine for themselves what information applies to them.
Seeing as the impact of proposed health care expansions will only be as great as their reach and utilization, we offer here a solution to this information bottleneck leveraging web 2.0 apomediation theory to create a personalized web platform able to automatically suggest free services and health screenings individuals may be eligible for under the Affordable Care Act. The platform we have built relies on sleek design and not volume of content to engage users. Instead of querying users on their medial history and insurance information, we distill our intake survey into five simple demographic questions. Current offerings by the US Preventive Services Task Force for this purpose are instead tailored for physicians, suffused with medical language and require medical knowledge to interpret.
Drawing upon strategies shown to be successful in engaging users, our platform additionally integrates social media and task-completion functionalities. Social incentives are powerful levers by which to motivate patients to modify health behaviors and have similar applicability in promoting the completion of preventive health screens. To provide consumers with discrete outputs, we have built in functionality to allow for immediate identification of local physicians with whom one can schedule appointments with planned extension into immediate online appointment booking.
Apomediation theory has widespread applicability to public health beyond the Affordable Care Act. Information about state and local services are spread across difficult to identify offices and resource databases. Several non-profit clearinghouses already exist such as Single Stop USA that collate information about social services for low-income individuals. Incorporating web 2.0 strategies, including personalization, intelligent interaction and social incentives represent the next steps to guiding consumers to relevant resources. Obama’s stated commitment to expanding internet access in rural and low-income communities further suggests relevance of such strategy. The wealth of publicly-available health data provided through websites such as healthindicators.gov, opendata.gov, healthdata.gov, and the IOM Health Data Initiative have potential to further support efforts in this area.
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