Understanding patients' health and technology attitudes for tailoring self-management interventions

Healthcare providers are moving towards tailoring self-management interventions to include the communication technologies patients use in daily life. Accurate understanding of patients' attitudes towards both technology and involvement in managing chronic conditions will be critical for informing effective self-management strategies. The tailoring of these interventions, however, could be undermined by providers' implicit biases based on patient age, race, and education level that have been shown to negatively affect care. To inform the design and tailoring of self-management interventions, we elicited attitudes toward technology use and participation in care of 40 participants in a maximum variation sample. The analysis revealed three participant clusters-"Proactive Techies," "Indie Self-Managers," and "Remind Me! Non-Techies"-that represent varying attitudes toward health behaviors and technologies that were independent of race, education level, and age. Our approach provides insight into how people prioritize important values related to health participation and technology.