If I said that my research objective was “to assess the patient-centeredness of personal health records,” who would you recommend that I interview?

I was flipping through a recent issue of JAMIA and noticed this article, “Improving personal health records for patient-centered care.” Some informatics folks at a nearby hospital took on the above objective, but used a curious strategy — they interviewed seven senior executives, three from hospitals, two from insurers, one from a commercial vendor, and one from a government agency.

For us, that would make a good project kickoff — get the perspectives of key decisions-makers first. Then, we’d go straight to the only people qualified to say whether a piece of software works for patients: patients themselves.