A Multimedia Patient Folder Management System as an Active Tool Supporting Physician's Activity

摘要

A patient folder management system should be the active supporting tool to the creation of the physician's belief about the patient's state of health, i.e. it has to be capable of retrieving and proposing the most appropriate and useful information to the user. Our target is to propose a new philosophy for a patient folder management system, capable of tailoring the information to the user's belief, goal and knowledge about medical data. An essential precondition is that the system must permanently store the information on users in order to be able to exploit them. In our prototype of multimedia patient folder management system the medical knowledge, the knowledge about user's way of working, goals, plans and strategies are integrated [1]. In this way the system makes the user able to perform an intelligent consultation of the folder. The software prototype developed has two main features: 1) the user's capability to define his/her own patient folder model, by specifying which information has to be represented and how it must be structured; 2) a dynamic interface management offering the user during consultation the opportunity, if needed, of avoiding the rigid structure given to the information with the former structuring. In fact, during the data input / output, it is possible to exploit those medical data views structured during the model definition phase. If this is the case, the system builds up run-time a new set of views, having as a starting point the information selected by the user and the inferred user's requirements. This process can either be completely user-guided, i.e. the user selects, according to his/her own needs, all the information he/she wants the system to show, or a coupled system-user-guided interaction (obviously a user-model is needed).