Chronic Disease Management System

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): This Phase I STTR is focused on testing the feasibility of developing a scalable, commercial health information system based on ClinfoTracker, an existing system developed in an academic setting. The proposed system can significantly impact the recognition, tracking and management of chronic diseases such as cancers. By tracking and managing activities and outcomes at all stages including screening, prevention, diagnosis and treatment, involving all care delivery partici pants, including patients and non-office care-givers, and delivering proactive prompts and reminders to clinicians regarding required services, this proposed system will greatly increase the ability of clinicians in prevention and care of chronic disease. Current health information systems and chronic disease management systems do not adequately address the needs of clinicians to provide comprehensive quality care. Electronic medical record systems focus on coding, transcription and the electronic capture o f documents and not on the management and care of chronic disease. Many health information technology solutions require changes to clinician workflow, cannot exchange data with other systems and are too expensive for adoption by small to mid-sized physicia n practices. Combining these issues provides a clinician with few options that are truly comprehensive and offer a favorable cost to benefit ratio. This STTR Phase I expands upon prior work by gathering more detail about the use of ClinfoTracker in practic e and developing the prototype of a full chronic disease management system through the following aims: 1.) Investigate how, in existing implementations, ClinfoTracker impacts prevention and chronic disease care by examining changes in care delivery and cli nical workflow, documenting the impact on patient, clinician and office staff satisfaction, detailing the system's problems, shortcomings and missing components and understanding the value proposition for practices and the patients they serve. 2.) Design a prototype of a fully- comprehensive system that is affordable and adoptable and built upon the principles of ClinfoTracker with input from potential end-users. Follow-up work in Phase II will include completing and meeting full product specifications, tes ting in clinical environments and evaluating its impact on users and developing user and technical documentation. A software solution that is well-designed and thorough, works with an existing clinical workflow and is reasonably priced will be ready accept ed by the market and can significantly impact the screening, prevention and treatment of chronic disease. This research will result in a prototype system that can significantly impact the screening, prevention and treatment of chronic disease, a problem th at affects over one-half of all U.S. citizens. Better prevention and treatment of chronic disease will reduce its detrimental impact on both the health of U.S. citizens and U.S. health care costs.