A patient-centric framework for multisourced actionable health solution

Abstract

Increasing cases of chronic diseases and a decrease of healthcare professionals are leading to time deficiencies in patient doctor communication on health issues during consultation hours. This has caused patients to suffer from a lack of understanding regarding their healthcare issues as well as raised actionability concerns for patients. Actionability is defined as the ability of patients to perform certain actions (taking drugs, going through treatments, etc.) that would benefit their healthcare problem. The deficiency of patients’ actionability occurs when patients have little to no opinion regarding potential health care solutions, as caused by the unavailability of physicians. Because of this, a framework capable of capturing treatment options and related information from online sources (medical websites and reviewed biomedical articles) with the aid of several third party applications, such as MMTx (MetaMap Transfer), RapidMiner, and E-Utils package is proposed. It is hypothesized that the actionability gap can be filled by increasing patients’ knowledge on their healthcare issues. This paper illustrates a conceptual level solution, with more comprehensive testing being carried out in future works to validate existing ideas. Moreover, the inclusion of clinical practice guidelines such as domain knowledge to sort out proper treatments options and a better output presentation in terms of user friendliness shall be applied to upcoming prototypes.