Chronic Patients as Developers of Innovative Healthcare Information Systems

Healthcare information systems are traditionally developed in institutional organizations such as medical providers' research labs, software houses and hospitals. IT and medical professionals are the constant analysts and developers of most health-care information systems on the market. Within this paper a new empirical trend is analyzed, in which patients turn themselves into the creators of new health-care information systems. A literature review is performed on how chronic patients are taking the lead in the development of new healthcare information systems and a few occurrence cases are studied from the research viewpoint. Findings suggest that the phenomenon is not well covered in the previous literature, and that it has implications for providers of commercial healthcare information systems.