Patient Education Based on Clinical Practice Guideline Recommendations to Improve Shared Decision Making in Healthcare Using Semantic Web Technology

Abstract

Patient education and evidence-based clinical practice are two important issues with respect to improving health outcomes. However, there is a “communication gap” between physicians and patients at the point of care. To improve patient compliance and health outcomes, there is a need to reduce this communication gap, and improve shared decision making between patients and physicians. We propose a patient education framework based on clinical practice guidelines (CPG-PE)—to improve shared decision making in healthcare using Semantic Web technologies. We present a comprehensive knowledge model to represent patient education materials. We demonstrate that computerized CPGs can be used to generate personalized patient education materials from available patient education by incorporating them into our CPG-PE framework. Our CPG-PE framework would serve as a clinical decision support system to the physicians and patients by generating education materials for the patients based on their disease condition(s) and co-morbidities, along with psychosocial and behavioral factors.