Challenges Affecting the Effective Communication of PHI to Non-Medical Users: A Contextual Inquiry

Non-medical users, those without any medical training background, have difficulties in accessing, reading, locating, understanding and interpreting their personal health information (PHI). Additionally, the medical user, those with a medical training background, use medical terminologies and language which makes it even more difficult for the non-medical users to understand their PHI. The aim of this study was to investigate the challenges experienced in communicating PHI effectively to non-medical users. A contextual inquiry was carried out and the results showed that limited access to PHI, lack of understanding the content in the PHI reports, lack of proper communication, lack of uniformity in the implementation of the EMR system, are some of the challenges preventing effective communication of PHI to non-medical users.