Family informatics

Abstract While families have a central role in shaping individual choices and behaviors, healthcare largely focuses on treating individuals or supporting self-care. However, a family is also a health unit. We argue that family informatics is a necessary evolution in scope of health informatics. To d...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association : JAMIA 2022-06, Vol.29 (7), p.1310-1315
Main Authors: Coiera, Enrico, Yin, Kathleen, Sharan, Roneel V, Akbar, Saba, Vedantam, Satya, Xiong, Hao, Waldie, Jenny, Lau, Annie Y S
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
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Family
Humans
Medical Informatics
Mental Health
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Summary:Abstract While families have a central role in shaping individual choices and behaviors, healthcare largely focuses on treating individuals or supporting self-care. However, a family is also a health unit. We argue that family informatics is a necessary evolution in scope of health informatics. To deal with the needs of individuals, we must ensure technologies account for the role of their families and may require new classes of digital service. Social networks can help conceptualize the structure, composition, and behavior of families. A family network can be seen as a multiagent system with distributed cognition. Digital tools can address family needs in (1) sensing and monitoring; (2) communicating and sharing; (3) deciding and acting; and (4) treating and preventing illness. Family informatics is inherently multidisciplinary and has the potential to address unresolved chronic health challenges such as obesity, mental health, and substance abuse, support acute health challenges, and to improve the capacity of individuals to manage their own health needs.
ISSN:1527-974X
1067-5027
1527-974X
DOI:10.1093/jamia/ocac049