“If you build it, they will come.”

In the past, this seemed to be the dominant paradigm for technology development and implementation in healthcare. This initial paradigm often led to poor user satisfaction and failed implementations of healthcare information technology. In the last few decades, informatics has embraced user-centered design principles to improve both the design and adoption of information and communication technologies. However, frequently the end-user is perceived to only be the clinician.

Although the data in healthcare are about and are received from patients, patients are not usually perceived of as end-users of health information or health information technology. In the popular press, we are seeing a grass-roots effort from patients to change their role in their own health management. A change to a more dynamic partnership with clinicians means we need tools that are able to support patients as well as clinicians in this partnership. New online tools and mobile applications are sprouting up to fill the demand, but rigorous evaluation of these tools can be lacking; leading to questionable quality and concerns for patient safety. The informatics field has the expertise to provide critical leadership in this area.

The call for this year's conference asked for authors to consider the role and voice of the patient. Patients themselves were invited to contribute papers describing their experiences in healthcare and their use of their own data. The papers here reflect not only the informatics innovations in the field, but also explore how to include the patients when considering design, implementation and long-term adoption of health information systems.

We hope that the knowledge shared between ITCH 2015 participants will generate further discussions and collaborations and lead to breakthroughs in delivering effective and inclusive healthcare worldwide.

Karen Courtney

School of Health Information Science

University of Victoria

Victoria, British Columbia

Canada