Developing a personal health record self-efficacy tool

The purpose of this preliminary work was to develop a new short tool to assess personal health records (PHRs) self-efficacy. Prior work had found 4 distinct skills related to creating, updating, tracking symptoms, and sharing information with health care providers using PHR. Although PHRs have great promise, their uptake has been rather limited, especially in economically limited populations. A convenience sample of community-living persons with HIV/AIDS (N = 100) was asked to complete the new tool along with other self-efficacy measures. Preliminary work indicated more confidence about paper-based PHRs compared with computer-based PHRs. The paper-based subscale was significantly correlated to chronic illness and HIV treatment self-efficacy scales as expected, but there were no relationships for the computer-based subscale. This simple screening tool could identify interested clients and their preference either for a paper-based or computer-based PHR. Further research is needed with larger sample sizes and different chronically ill populations to further explore the psychometrics of the instrument.