Consumer Health Informatics to Advance Precision Prevention

Consumer health informatics (CHI) has the potential to disrupt traditional but unsustainable break-fix models of healthcare and catalyse precision prevention of chronic disease - a preventable global burden. This perspective article reviewed how consumer health informatics can advance precision prevention across four research and practice areas: (1) public health policy and practice (2) individualised disease risk assessment (3) early detection and monitoring of disease (4) tailored intervention of modifiable health determinants.

We review and narratively synthesise methods and published recent (2018 onwards) research evidence of interventional studies of consumer health informatics for precision prevention. An analysis of research trends, ethical considerations, and future directions is presented as a guide for consumers, researchers, and practitioners to collectively prioritise advancing two interlinked fields towards high-quality evidence generation to support practice translation. A health consumer co-author provided critical review at all stages of manuscript preparation, moderating the allied health, medical and nursing researcher perspectives represented in the authorship team.

Precision prevention of chronic disease is enabled by consumer health informatics methods and interventions in population health surveillance using real-world data (e.g., genomics) (public health policy and practice), disease prognosis (regression modelling, machine learning) (individualized disease risk assessment), wearable devices and mobile health (mHealth) applications that generate digital phenotypes (early detection and monitoring), and targeted behaviour change interventions based upon personalized risk algorithms (tailored intervention of modifiable health determinants). In our disease case studies, there was mixed evidence for the effectiveness of consumer health informatics to improve risk-stratified or behavioural prevention-related health outcomes. Research trends comprise both consumer-centred and healthcare-centred innovations, with emphasis on inclusive design methodologies, social licence of health data use, and federated learning to preserve data sovereignty and maximise cross-jurisdictional analytical power.

Together, CHI and precision prevention represent a potential future vanguard in shifting from traditional and inefficient break-fix to predict-prevent models of healthcare. Meaningful researcher, practitioner, and consumer partnerships must focus on generating high-quality evidence from methodologically robust study designs to support consumer health informatics as a core enabler of precision prevention.