A Personalized Patient Education Framework to Support Diabetes Patients Self-management

Abstract

Patient self-management support focuses on encouraging patients to be knowledgeable about their illness and to be able to sufficiently look after themselves. Some key elements to this achievement include knowledge, motivation, self-efficacy, goal-setting, action planning and problem-solving. In this paper, we describe a personalized patient education framework aimed to provide personalized learning resource recommendations for patients. Specifically, resources are recommended based on patients' goals and barriers. We built a patient's self-management portal that allows a patient to define his or her goals and barriers in the patient profile. Learning resources help to support patient education that can promote a patient to achieve the specified goals. In this framework, an ontology-based approach will be used for modeling patient's goals and barriers as well as learning subjects. Ontology allows patient conditions and learning resource metadata to be linked. Finally, we discuss evaluation plan for assessing the framework effectiveness in terms of improvement of patient's efficacy, i.e., knowledge test score, confidence levels and satisfaction.