The need for a personalized, core digital resource to facilitate health self-management

High quality healthcare is becoming increasingly unaffordable and inaccessible. To reverse this trend, people need to self-manage as much of their health as possible. They need to take appropriate preventive actions and use health services in a timely and efficient manner. Yet health self-management is challenging in an increasingly complex environment that involves competing demands and sometimes contradictory advice as well as increasingly fragmented delivery of health services. Digital tools have added a new dimension to healthcare and hold the potential to help bridge these challenges. Unfortunately, much of the potential benefit of digital resources is not being realized, partly because of difficulties people face in identifying appropriate and effective resources in a haystack of mainly unevaluated and often poorly conceived resources. Underuse and failure to maintain use of resources found to be effective also retards progress. Furthermore, people need more help to understand their needs and establish priorities around their health self-management. We argue that these needs can be met with a person-centered, digital self-management core resource that supports people to better understand their needs and priorities and has links to find the resources they need to manage their health, alone or by judicious use of health services.