Pasienesia: A mobile based e-patient social network: Promoting empowerment among patients who experience similar diseases

The rising of e-patient has promoted self-awareness and active participation among health consumers and patients to be fully involved in their medical care. One of the embodiments of e-patient movement is the online patient community via social media. More consumers and patients use social media to acquire health information from other consumers and patients who experience similar diseases. Likewise, people become more open to share their personal health condition so that others could take advantage from their experiences. However, the usage of general social media comes with the classical issues of privacy, trustworthiness, and accuracy. Accordingly, this study aims to build an e-patient social network solution to support the future prospect of social media usage in e-patient and to resolve the classical issues in social media. The proposed system connects patients with similar diseases, facilitates health information sharing and discussion among patients with the assistance of medical professionals. The solution development follows a modified rapid application development methodology consisting of formulating the e-patient social network requirements, designing the mobile-based e-patient system (Pasienesia), and evaluating the implementation. The evaluation with clinicians, consumers, and patients with chronic diseases demonstrates the suitability and the usefulness of the proposed e-patient system solution.