Health Information Technology Use for Dementia Care

Health information technology (HIT) use can improve the quality of care and potentially make healthcare more cost effective, which would benefit individual patients as well as their caregivers, healthcare providers and healthcare organizations, public health professionals, researchers, community-based organizations, and healthcare payers. It has been demonstrated that HIT has potential to improve dementia care, which is often complex because the needs of care change as the disease progresses, and the care involve various components. However, limited studies have been conducted to explore the implementation of HIT in dementia caregiving. Two major applications of consumer HIT include electronic personal health records (ePHRs) and telehealth. While plenty of studies have been conducted to explore implementation of HIT from the healthcare provider side, more studies are warranted to understand HIT implementation among the consumers.To fill the research gap, this dissertation aimed to: (1) review previous implementation of ePHRs for dementia care; (2) assess the level of dementia caregivers' proxy access to care recipients' ePHRs and examine the factors that are associated with proxy access to care recipients' ePHRs among dementia caregivers and non-dementia caregivers; and (3) assess the level of telemedicine services utilization among dementia caregivers and non-dementia caregivers, and examine factors related to receipt of telemedicine services among dementia caregivers and non-dementia caregivers. This dissertation will improve understanding of HIT use, especially ePHRs and telemedicine use for dementia care, and have implications for future development of HIT system to better meet dementia care needs.