SBIR Phase I: Delivering Medical translations with a Health Belief Model Recommender Engine

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is the development of a first-in-class patient education tool. The project aims to develop a method to customize and personalize the delivery of medical content with the goal of influencing medication compliance and health outcomes. Imagine patients are discharged from the hospital and understand their discharge instructions. Imagine patients fill a list of ten medications but understand what they are for and why they need to take them. Imagine patients recently diagnosed with cancer that do not feel embarrassed to ask their doctor questions. Imagine parents caring for sick children or older children caring for elderly parents that feel assured of their ability to get the best care for loved ones. Imagine a reduction in sick days, hospital readmission rates, and morbidity and mortality rates. Imagine an overall improvement in the quality of care and health of the nation all due to the simple ingredients of patient understanding and patient empowerment. The proposed project will produce a novel tool to deliver medical content to patients based of an assessment of their limiting beliefs and perceptions. It has long been established that the effectiveness of medical interventions aimed at changing behavior are limited by patient's perceptions and beliefs. The proposed project will result in the development of novel algorithms that use machine-learning (ML) based techniques to determine limiting beliefs. The goal is to customize patient education and medical content to the beliefs, perception, and language of the patients.