A web-based service for improving conformance to medication treatment and patient-physician relationship

Abstract

The proposed service is a health-related web portal serving a twofold purpose: Reminding the patient of important tasks related to a long-term treatment, such as medication intake, clinical encounters, follow-up actions etc., as well as tightening the patient-physician relationship through bidirectional communication. The physician is able to register and review patient-related information through a user-friendly web-based interface, assign medication treatment plans, examination plans etc. The patient receives notifications about the treatment plan through several means, including Short Message Service (SMS) and e-mail. The common web-based space shared by the patient and the physician enables the bidirectional exchange of observations or comments about the treatment, publishing additional guidelines augmenting the treatment outcome, reporting side-effects etc. The implementation of the service is based on MS SQL Server Notification Services technology and we believe that is has the potential to improve adherence to the medication plans, especially in the case of long-term therapy. © 2007 International Federation for Information Processing.