By John Liesveld, Web and Social Media Support, Project HealthDesign
Seated on the crinkly paper of the examination table, under the pasty sterile glow of fluorescence, wearing only a lightweight gown and skivvies, a lot of editing can occur in the mind of a patient before he speaks to his doctor.
But when it comes to a chronic illness, such as Crohn's disease, an honest, accurate and timely account of ODLs makes a profound difference - sometimes between life and death. It's an idea that epitomizes one of Project HealthDesign's major themes -- more efficient, accurate and streamlined communication.
Dr. Jonathan Terdiman, a professor of Clinical Medicine and Surgery at the University of California at San Francisco who specializes in inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) and serves as a co-principal investigator for the Crohnology.MD project, says discrepancies in communication create one of the biggest barriers for doctors to overcome in treating and improving patient health and can result in adverse health outcomes.
An illness like Crohn’s disease produces a series of debilitating symptoms that fluctuate daily, sometimes hourly, and require critical attention from both a doctor and a patient in order to maintain health. Unfortunately, without good methods for recording and evaluating symptoms and their potential causes, patients are more likely to provide inaccurate summaries of their ODLs and may affect their doctor’s ability to effectively treat the disease.
The complex symptomatic variations of an illness can lead to a common barrier that physicians like Terdiman face with each patient: communication. And he emphasizes, it is “very hard to capture the full depth [of a patient’s health] in a single visit." Whether it’s simply forgetting to mention something or only saying what the patient thinks the doctor wants to hear, finding a way around communication barriers like these is key to accurately tracking ODLs.
“One of the challenges is to try to come up with some sort of a compromise to assimilate, tabulate and streamline data,” Terdiman said. He explains that by providing a patient with the right tools (e.g. a smartphone containing specific software apps) they can record and track symptoms in real time, correlate those symptoms with diet and medications and then upload the data to an EMR that allows physicians to depict trends in a graphical display.
With the right tool and software we will “enhance our ability to really understand what’s happening with the patient," Terdiman explains.
Developing that tool is a major objective of Crohnology.MD and other research projects developed by Project HealthDesign. In practice, Terdiman has long recognized a need, identified by patients, for a tool that records, assimilates and summarizes data in way that identifies trends and possible underlying causes of symptoms and is excited to work with the grantees to make the tool a reality.
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