Evaluating Mihealth Liverpool: Assessing the effectiveness of new health information and communication technology in providing support to patients with breast cancer receiving treatment in Liverpool

Executive Summary: This report outlines findings from a series of pilot studies that aimed to assess the effectiveness of an innovative patient information delivery system called 'mihealth'. It was conducted over a two-year period with breast cancer patients receiving treatment in Liverpool. McCartney Breast Care Unit at the Royal Liverpool Hospital, patient support groups former patients and regional health networks, 'mihealth' combines generic and localised health, social and personal care information for those suffering from breast conditions. Although the types of information gathered in the course of the study have varied, all the findings that we will discuss in this report relate back to the question that provided the focus of the evaluation as a whole: did mihealth work for the patients it was designed to support? Without preempting later discussions, we can report that mihealth did not only work, but that it worked in a variety of ways to expand (1) the pool of resources available to patients, (2) the strategies patients used to make those resources work and (3) the strategies used to subsequently manage, search for and evaluate further information resources. While mihealth should not be seen as a once-and-for-all substitute for other types of information, we argue that the evaluation demonstrates that mihealth added a new and welcome dimension to the often confusing 'information landscape' (Appadurai, 1986) that patients with serious conditions must navigate. However, to understand how patients make technology work for them and the problems they encounter when trying to do so, we must also recognise that new technology ultimately succeeds or fails, less on the intrinsic merits of the design itself, and more in terms of its reception within the social, cultural and organisational settings that those who use the system (or who affect those who use the technology) operate within. In simple terms, if no room is created or available for new technology, if it is unwelcome, neglected or misunderstood when it arrives, the technology is doomed to have a short and unhappy shelf-life (Latour, 1983, Suchman, 1987). For all practical purposes, potential users will simply not be able to take the time to make the technology feel like an " at home " , familiar part of their daily lives (Sacks, 1992). With that said, although findings in this area were perhaps more equivocal than in other areas of the evaluation, we can report that mihealth performed comparably well. Indeed in …