FOCUS Information Technology develops new program to improve patient care
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magine an interactive computer program that gives you more accurate assessments of symptoms than a person-to-person interview, providing the best insight into how your patient is feeling. Insight, a new patient software program developed at Christiana Care, promises more accurate and detailed information from patients to health care providers. Research has shown that patients sometimes don’t reveal symptoms such as pain or depression to an interviewer. But when responding to 20 questions on a laptop computer or PC tablet, these same patients seem to overcome the anxiety that may cause them to give inaccurate, vague information during a live interview.
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Mitchell Saltzberg, M.D., medical director of Christiana Care’s Heart Failure Program and Insight software clinical co-leader, shows a patient how to use the symptom self-assessment computer program .
What’s more, the information comes directly from the patient, not filtered through a doctor or a nurse, which can lead clinicians to downplay the importance of a symptom to a patient. Staff from Christiana Care Information Technology designed Insight for easy Gets better feedback on pain severity use in the waiting room. An immedi“Insight elicits symptoms from ate report printed to the physician’s patients not only in a yes-or-no way, work station makes it easy to review but also by letting them provide input all the indications and spend more on severity,” says Theresa Gillis, medtime with the patient on the more seriical director of Oncology ous symptoms. Rehabilitation Services and a specialist “The next visit, the patient repeats the in oncology pain and symptom management. “The patient might be asked symptom assessment and then the physician can compare the reports to about his or her pain intensity or shortness of breath, or fatigue intensi- get a sense of whether interventions ty, in the past week on a scale from 0- are helping or not,” says Dr. Gillis. 10. So you gather not only the presence of a symptom, but how severe that symptom is, and a sense of how important that is to the patient.
Mitchell Saltzberg, M.D., medical director of the Heart Failure Program, was co-leader along with Dr. Gillis of CONTINUED,
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