User-driven health care - answering multidimensional information needs in individual patients utilizing post-EBM approaches: a conceptual model

Evidence based on average patient data, which occupies most of our present day information databases, does not fulfil the needs of individual patient-centred health care. In spite of the unprecedented expansion in medical information we still do not have the types of information required to allow us to tailor optimal care for a given individual patient. As our current information is chiefly provided in disconnected silos, we need an information system that can seamlessly integrate different types of information to meet diverse user group needs. Groups of certain individual medical learners namely patients, medical students and health professionals share the patient's need to increasingly interact with and seek knowledge and solutions offered by others (individual medical learners) who have the lived experiences that they would benefit to access and learn from. A web-based user-driven learning solution may be a stepping-stone to address the present problem of information oversupply in medicine that mostly remains underutilized, as it doesn't meet the needs of the individual patient and health professional user. The key to its success would be to relax central control and make local trust and strategic health workers feel more engaged in the project such that it is truly user-driven.