Oppgaveformulering

PAsTAs - Patients Trajectories, Web-interface

PAsTAs (Patient Trajectories, or “Pasientforløp”) is a project that is analyzing what happens to chronically ill patients, as they are moved between their primary doctor, the hospital, and other services offered by the local government.

Currently, the information about single patients is not coordinated between hospitals and other services, so it is difficult to do research about what combination of services is best for chronically ill patients.

In this project, we work with data from doctors, home care services and hospitals to identify how patients move between these instances and how small differences can affect the health of the patients.

A patient trajectory is a sequence of (possibly parallel) health care events like hospitalization, visiting the doctor, receiving public health services, getting diagnosed, taking medicine, etc. These events are connected to specific times or intervals of times in the patient’s life. The patient trajectories consist of data from electronic health-care records (EHR).

THE PROJECT TASK:

The idea is to let a patient see a timeline of their interactions with the health sector. The webpage https://helsenorge.no/ gives a patient an overview of some of their interactions with the health sector. This timeline will be something like this, only showing the data more clearly. The developed final web interface will visualize the patient’s history in a way that the patient can easily recognize and understand their own timelines.

It is also thought that the patient can see what is planned for them in the near future. If a patient has a stroke, the hospital has a planned course of action for the patient to go through in order to ensure a good recovery. Showing these planned actions in the timeline can make the patient more aware of what they have to go through. (MinID?)

Since the timelines are only shown to the patient it regards, we can put more details into it. Such details can be what medicines they have been prescribed and which doctors they have been in contact with(?). In order to protect each patients' information, we will have to ensure their privacy is secured. This can be done by making them log on with a secure password.

The specifications for the new prototype system will be based on Håkon Wågbø's master report, and a report from a user-design-workshop to be held in 2014/2015 including interviews with a patient user group. The focus will be on the patients as a user for this project, but the plan is for it to be used by doctors as well. The EHR data will be made available in an Event-Stream format (see https://www.ntnu.no/wiki/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=55739223 ) called the Manchester OWL-format, to follow an international standard. The format will be used to produce anonymous trajectories online, and to store the patients' answers.

For more information on the PAsTAs project, see http://telemed.no/pastas-pasientforloep.5219575-247951.html. The overall aim of the PAsTAs project is to “keep the patient out of hospital by improving patient trajectories in primary care”.

The project will be done with the same data as Dagrun og Hanne: PAsTAs – Typology: Clustering Patients Trajectories.

Co-supervisor: Øystein Nytrø