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The simple choices that individuals make in their lifestyles can greatly effect affect how they respond to their clinical care plan which target around their chronic conditions (Ornish, 2004). Since patients with chronic conditions must rely on self-management efforts, arming these patients with as much information as possible can greatly impact the quality of care. It has been clearly recognized that an integrative healthcare approach is necessary to accommodate health promotion, disease prevention, and new treatments (James & Folen, 2005).
CareNav envisions personal health applications as a robust assimilation platform which includes a single, integrated hub designed to allow patients and providers the ability to manage and plan their healthcare. Overall the personal health record should take into account personalized data inputs which will act as the cornerstone for the a person's user experience. Personalization can be driven by disparate data sources such as
The information processing and data mining tools can make meaningful changes based on data inference by expert system input which can learn and aid in developing new clinical rules.
Past CareNav experience shows that individuals and their families with chronic conditions such as diabetes, congestive heart failure, and coronary artery disease, as well as those in need of frail/elderly care, tend to utilize use web-based personal health records over more than the general population. These populations of patients are required to make decisions and to engage in behaviors that affect their health through their self-management practices (Rubin & Peyrot, 2001). Therefore the more informed patients are about their health, the more active role they can take in managing their health. The outcome for disease control depends to a great extent on the effectiveness of self-management behaviors. But self-management cannot apply when the patient is unaware or unable to accept the responsibilities of self-management.