An intelligent assistant for patient health care

Abstract

The Patient Advocate is designed to be an intelligent assistant for patient-centered health care. Residing on a home computer or special-purpose device and operating within an extended health-care information network, the Patient Advocate will extend medical expertise into the outpatient setting. It will have remote access to the patient’s medical record, an understanding of the patient’s health status and history, and a model of the patient’s interest in health-related issues, preferences for modes and contents of interaction, etc. The Patient Advocate is being designed to provide three kinds of functions. First, it will assist the patient in managing continuing ambulatory conditions, for example chronic problems such as diabetes, special normal conditions such as prenatal care, and wellness issues such as diet, exercise, and stress. Second, it will provide health-related information by allowing the patient to interact with the online health-care information network and scan media resources to suggest information of interest. Third, it will act as a remote triage point for clinical services by coordinating patient-relevant information such as reminding the patient when a visit to the clinic is indicated. We describe a prototype of the Patient Advocate which is designed to support obstetrics patients at risk of gestational diabetes. It is important that the Patient Advocate is platform-independent, runs on widely available hosts, and has access to various Internet resources. Therefore, it is implemented in Java and is Internet accessible. 1. Patient-Centered Care is Needed In recent years, several knowledge-based systems have been introduced to support health care providers (mainly clinicians) with the monitoring of critical care patients and to assist them with diagnostic decisions and therapy planning (Uckun 1994b). These systems range from simple intelligent alarms to sophisticated systems for anesthesia monitoring or ventilator management (e.g.,

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