PanDa – A PATIENT DIARY FOR CONTROL WITH MEDICATION

16.02.2004

Abstract

Control with medication is very important for people’s health. In Norway, as much as 10% of hospitalization is assumed to be caused by medication error, non compliance or adverse effects of medication. Some of the problems are caused by lack of control with medication, and/or reporting of lack of compliance with medication. For a patient, it is often hard to remember all the details concerning compliance, adverse effects, etc., during the few minutes a visit to the doctor takes.

If the patient’s current problem is an effect of non-compliance, and not that the patient needs another prescription, it is very important that information about non-compliance is reported to the patient’s doctor during a visit. A patient diary can be an appropriate tool for improving medication control. If the diary contain relevant questions about effect of medication as well as general health status, it is possible to provide both the patient him/herself as well as the doctor an accurate view of the health status since last visit.

Regularly updating the diary will also force the patient to re-evaluate the effect of medication as well as his/her’s general condition. It will also be possible to build in sub-systems that automatically warn the patients as well as relatives and health personnel about possible changes in the patient’s general condition. Another feature may be the possibility to include health data from medical body monitoring systems, etc.

At the Norwegian Centre for Telemedicine and the Department of Computer Science, University of Tromsø, we have constructed PanDa, a web-based patient diary that gives the patient the possibility to monitor his/her own use of medication (See Figure 1) (Sletteng, 2004). The goal has been to provide the patient with a tool for registration of the effect of medication, both through answering questions regarding the patient’s illness as well as free form text-based input. The diary supports the following three patient groups: pain, asthma and diabetes. The patient has to record his/her medication in advance from a complete list of relevant drugs for the specific illness. The diary will produce graphs that present the development of the specific medication-related questions on a monthly basis. Much emphasis is put on authentication and authorization. In addition, no personal identification data are stored on the server side.

The system has been tested by a small group of users. The presentation will present the background for PandDa and give an overview of the system as well as experiences so far.