Guideline-based Visualization of Medication in Chronic Disease

Abstract

Chronic disease management at the General Practice level is a challenging task requiring synthesis of information across time and possibly several practitioners. Sparsity of data, lack of structure, lack of time are limiting factors of computer use in this domain. Authors are exploring the concept of visualization of individual patient's medication using a clinical guideline to provide some structure to the problem by creating a state-transition model. This approach was shown to be promising at the practice level in previous research [1,5,6] where an overall synthesis of practice decisions was created and alerts were generated on the basis of individual transactions or states - current focus is on individual patient and the sequence of states describing his/her medication history.