272 9 Chapter 9 TAKE HOME MESSAGES | THEME 1 • Patient empowerment has the potential to improve health outcomes and increase patient satisfaction. However, it must be accompanied by sufficient health literacy to ensure informed decision-making. Lack of health or eHealth literacy can lead to risky choices and negative outcomes, despite patient empowerment. • While eHealth has the potential to empower people in self-managing their disease, digital health technologies or services should fit people’s eHealth literacy needs. • The eHLQ Dutch version can be a useful tool to understand the eHealth literacy needs of people in a Dutch healthcare or research setting and guide the design, development, and evaluation of eHealth solutions. THEME 2 - MEANINGFUL INVOLVEMENT OF END-USERS AND THE PUBLIC The continuously evolving digital landscape has led to the general consensus among academics and health innovators that involving end-users should be standard practice in the development and evaluation of eHealth solutions (10). This agreement is rooted in the understanding that solutions are more likely to meet end-users’ needs and benefit them when they are actively involved in the design process. Meaningful involvement, however, requires that end-users are able to articulate their needs. A seemingly logical requirement, but one that is often overlooked by medical and healthcare researchers, and prompted the question: “how can we help people articulate their needs?” (Challenge one, General introduction). How can we reveal the deeper levels of knowledge? In current healthcare research and intervention design, medical researchers often rely on qualitative methods such as interviews of focus groups discussions to identify end-users’ needs. Qualitative researchers are generally trained to be good observers and listeners. They interpret what is being said or what they observe into what it means. However, their source of data strongly depends on how well people can articulate themselves or verbalise their needs, or the observation of behaviour at the specific moment in time. As mentioned in the beginning of this dissertation, needs, motivations and desires are often concealed in deeper knowledge layers. Knowledge that people can act upon but not readily express in words (tacit knowledge) and knowledge people are not aware of yet (latent knowledge). These types of knowledge do not necessarily manifest themselves in the present in order to be observed (11). However, these deeper knowledge layers can be revealed using participatory design methods (12, 13) . This dissertation (chapters 2,3 and 4) exemplified various approaches to using participatory design methods. It demonstrated how design and creative practices can help people articulate their needs, thereby granting them a voice in the design
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTk4NDMw