Diabetes education becomes personalised
Researchers at the University of South Australia have developed a
web-based program that gives people with diabetes access to information
tailored to suit their individual needs and supports the care process
through improved interaction between doctor and patient.
Developed by Chinese-trained medical doctor and information technology PhD student, Dr Chunlan Ma, the program is designed to equip patients with essential diabetes knowledge to better manage their illness and improve health outcomes.
Diabetes affects some 140 million people worldwide. A major challenge for health providers is the lack of control that they have over their patients’ diabetes management, according to Dr Ma.
“One of the particular characteristics of diabetes is that patients have to do about 95 per cent of their health care themselves. Diabetes sufferers need to take responsibility for controlling their diet, undertaking physical exercise, testing their blood-sugar levels, taking and adjusting medications, and importantly, incorporating all of these elements into their daily lifestyle,” Dr Ma said.
“The major difficulty for these people in managing their health care is that many do not have adequate knowledge about their diabetes and its treatment,” she said.
“Of those who are educated, some don’t follow recommended procedures for various reasons so one of the challenges for health providers is to find ways to support patients to take responsibility for their health care with information that promotes lifestyle and other behavioural changes.”
Dr Ma has developed a set of rule-based algorithms, called Violet Technology, to tailor and prioritise appropriate diabetes information that is patient-centred. This clever technology uses a patient’s personal data as the input and generates information that is relevant and of high priority to the user – giving the right information at the right time.
“It promotes the doctor/patient partnership by improving a patient’s essential diabetes knowledge and doctor/patient communication,” Dr Ma said.
“People newly diagnosed with diabetes are often in shock and not ready to absorb all of the information that they need to know. Rather than bombarding them with everything at once, our web program prioritises what is most important for them based on their profile and health status. It gives them useful basic information, like survival information, and advice on what they need to do, what to eat and how much, without having to read a whole book.
“For patients experienced in diabetes management, the program focuses on complications, health improvement and diabetes treatment research,” Dr Ma said.
The program includes information graded from basic and essential to comprehensive, as well as quiz questions and an agenda service.
“We found that including quiz questions was an effective way of learning and increased patients’ understanding of their illness. The questions have been prioritised so that users are only quizzed about specific knowledge that is relevant to them and wrong answers are corrected and explained. If people don’t understand some answers, they can paste them into their agenda on the website so that they can be explained fully when they speak to their doctor,” she said.
The agenda service was included to help doctor/patient communication because it is common for patients to have an unknown agenda. “This doesn’t mean that they don’t have questions to ask their health professionals but often don’t know what to ask, or they forget them,” she said.
“The agenda helps patients to generate a list of questions or concerns before scheduled visits to their doctor, and to think carefully about what they want to know and any difficulties they may have. It also includes questions that prompt them to address issues that they may know little about. These could be clinical issues, or symptoms such as tingling feet and the association between that and neuropathy.
“Patients can also look at past questions, select ones that they need reviewed and clip them to their agenda for further clarification. If doctors have access to a patient’s account, they can log in, look at any difficulties or information the patient is interested in and prepare ahead,” she said.
In addition to being a valuable resource for all types of diabetes, Dr Ma believes that the web program will enable diabetes sufferers to become more involved and have greater control over their healthcare, and significantly enhance the doctor/patient partnership.
She hopes that by using the program diabetes sufferers will understand and acknowledge the truth about their health status, the severity of their illness and its possible consequences, and make appropriate lifestyle changes for the best possible health outcomes.
Dr Ma’s research is being supervised by Professor Jim Warren, Head of UniSA’s Health Infomatics Research Laboratory.