A Personalized Framework for Medication Treatment Management in Chronic Care

Abstract

The ongoing efforts toward continuity of care and the recent advances in information and communication technologies have led to a number of successful personal health systems for the management of chronic care. These systems are mostly focused on monitoring efficiently the patient's medical status at home. This paper aims at extending home care services delivery by introducing a novel framework for monitoring the patient's condition and safety with respect to the medication treatment administered. For this purpose, considering a body area network (BAN) with advanced sensors and a mobile base unit as the central communication hub from the one side, and the clinical environment from the other side, an architecture was developed, offering monitoring patterns definition for the detection of possible adverse drug events and the assessment of medication response, supported by mechanisms enabling bidirectional communication between the BAN and the clinical site. Particular emphasis was given on communication and information flow aspects that have been addressed by defining/adopting appropriate formal information structures as well as the service-oriented architecture paradigm. The proposed framework is illustrated via an application scenario concerning hypertension management.

A New Healthcare Context Information: The Social Context

“…Despite their measuring difficulties, they should be considered along with the measurable context in the healthcare context [9], [14].…”

“…provide the current medications given for a patient as it affects the readings of patient"s vital signs [9], [14], [15]. Thus, healthcare givers evaluate the patient"s response to take the appropriate medical decisions [9].…”

A situation-aware ubiquitous approach for assessing therapeutic goals in hospital environment

“…The discussion of related work included the following projects: MTM-CC (Koutkias et al, 2010), HeartCycle (Chouvarda et al, 2011), SIMAp (Leite, 2011) e PA-DSS (Gunawardane et al, 2009).…”

Development of an Internet-Based Chronic Disease Self-Management System

“…A new trend is emerging: people with chronic conditions become their own principal caregivers, with health care professionals acting as consultants supporting them in this role (Holman & Lorig, 2000). By encouraging patients to participate actively in determining the course of their diseases and ensuring they have the skills, knowledge, and confidence to manage their health, patient selfmanagement programs can improve health outcomes (Bodenheimer, Lorig, & Holman, 2002), increase treatment satisfaction (Sawicki, 1999) and safety (Koutkias & Malousi, 2010), as well as reduce healthcare costs (Lahdensuo et al, 1998).…”