eHealth and Telecare
Introduction
The increased use of ICT in the organisation and delivery of healthcare offers the potential to increase the information and knowledge available to the clinician to support their decision-making. In this way the development of decision support systems forms a key component of the research programme of the Centre. Related to this is research seeking to automate the process of acquiring medical knowledge from the web, and developing tools to manage such knowledge more effectively.
However, as well as supporting the clinician, there are also opportunities to help the patient better manage their disease. This is particularly the case in relation to chronic diseases such as diabetes and hypertension, where information systems are being developed with the objective of making the patient better informed about their disease condition.
REALITY: an Evaluation Study in Home Telecare
Abdul Roudsari, Howard Leicester, Fiona Harvey, Roland Petchey, Peter Levine, Derek Cramp , Ewart Carson and other members of a European consortium
This EU-funded project focuses on a range of evaluation aspects associated with home telecare. The project consortium, led by CHI, includes clinical partners from Estonia, Portugal and the UK, together with a UK technical partner responsible for the provision of hand-held computers being used by patients in their home settings. Patients across a range of urban and rural settings in these countries are collecting both clinical and quality of life data associated with the management of their chronic disease. The chronic diseases involved are chronic respiratory failure, bronchial asthma, chronic heart failure, hypertension and type 2 diabetes.
Socio-economic evaluation is now being undertaken from the perspectives of the patient, the healthcare professional and the health manager. Preliminary findings indicate that issues needing to be addressed in order to achieve a successful telecare operation include: proper patient selection methodology; the need for suitable and adequate training for all those involved in the delivery of care process; improved co-operation and support of telecommunication operators; the key role of nurses and their involvement; the need for clear user instructions in simple language; and simplification of data input, including less complex question sets.
Towards The Semantic Web: The Automation of Knowledge Acquisition from the Medical Web
Mohammad Ali Eljinini, Nazar Sarhan (Al-Isra University, Amman) and Ewart Carson
The current Web contains a wealth of information in the form of natural text. HTML documents are designed for human consumption and not for machines. Adding machine understandable representation to web documents will enable contents-guided searching and reasoning. This will lead the web to its full potential. It is impractical to go back and annotate the current web manually. Such process is labour intensive, prone to errors, and requires expertise with new complex technologies. The aim of this research is the development of techniques for extracting knowledge from medical-related websites with the guide of ontologies. The first part of this work is about the ontology development and the possibility of reusing exiting ontologies. The second part concentrates on methodologies for extracting the right information which is to be transformed into machine understandable form.
Providing Patient Information for Managing Chronic Disease
Emma-Jane Berridge, Mira Vogel, Abdul Roudsari and Ewart Carson
ICT-based systems are being designed and evaluated so as to enable patients to obtain information at home about the nature of their chronic disease and how they should better manage it. The activity has initially focused on the provision of information for individual diseases, though the aim is to produce an integrated, web-based, CAL system providing information about diabetes, hypertension and asthma, which are amongst the most common chronic diseases. By using appropriate techniques of knowledge management and adaptive learning it is increasingly possible to tailor the information provided to the needs of the specific user. This application domain in health informatics has great growth potential consequent upon the increasing empowerment of patients as customers in relation to healthcare provision. By adopting sound methodology for system design and evaluation, web-based information packages are being produced that meet the needs of the patient as the system user.
Evaluating the Impact of Digital Libraries on Knowledge about Healthcare (Current)
Gemma Madle ,Patty Kostokova, and Abdul Roudsari
Recent years have seen an explosion in the availability of healthcare information for both patient and healthcare professional. Are patients applying the information in an appropriate manner, which will assist them and their clinician in managing their health? Or is the information retrieved by patients inaccurate, or simply misunderstood? For healthcare professionals this availability should enhance evidence-based decision-making. However, recent research suggests that senior clinicians can be reluctant to allow more junior staff access to current evidence-based information, preferring instead to provide it for them or withholding it altogether. This provides further support for the importance of medical digital libraries that are accessible to all via the Internet and their potential role in changing the culture of the health working environment and the relationships within it.
The impact of such ehealth technologies on the knowledge and attitudes of health professionals and patients is being investigated. Approaches include recruiting panels of health professionals and patients in a longitudinal study to investigate the impact of the National electronic Library for Communicable Disease on professional practice and patient behaviour.