E-Health for Women: a Web Tool Designed to Inform Women of Individualized Health Recommendations

Background: Many women do not monitor their cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk or receive regular medical screenings or checkups. Designing an e-health tool that provides women with personalized screenings and checkup information may improve both women`s engagement in recommended screenings and their risk factor monitoring and control. Most e-health behavior promotion tools are created through top-down design; however, public health research indicates the necessity of bottom up, participant-based design.

Purpose: To identify women`s preferences and needs regarding health behaviors in the creation of a bottom-up designed e-health tool.

Methods: Focus groups were conducted with women from different sectors (Arab, Jewish secular and Ultra-orthodox Jewish) in Jerusalem to identify women`s needs and preferences for an e-health tool design.

Results: Focus groups indicated that women are unaware of the recommended tests, screenings, and medical checkups for women and are therefore limited in their ability to to effectively monitor or control their health. The need for a tool that would provide accessibility to individualized health recommendations for women was identified in all sectors.

Conclusions: We identified a need to design and launch an e-health tool that provides women with profiled, individually tailored information about recommended tests, screening, and medical checkups. A prototype has been developed and is being tested. This e-health tool provides women with gender-specific output indicating the recommended frequency of medical tests, screenings, vaccines, and medical checkups, in addition to physical activity and nutrition recommendations, according to each user`s age, BMI, and family history of heart disease.