Development and evaluation of an integrated patient-oriented education management system for diabetes.

This paper describes and evaluates a Patient-Oriented education management system for diabetes using the Internet (POEM). With this system at each patient visit, the system can automatically download a patient's medical services records, prescriptions, laboratory test results and his/her patient education materials, and organize them into a series of case folders based on his/her medical service history in a hospital. The system can also provide patients with reminders to call for return to their hospitals for further treatment under certain conditions, such as one week before their appointments, the period of their HbA1C test if it is more than three months away, and emergency calls for any anomaly in a laboratory test result. We present them on the Web to support continued patient education at a low cost. The evaluation results showed that the system was able to help patients maintain better control of their glucose levels and better management of their diabetes condition as well. More importantly, the system supports routine hospital patient education services and assists patients to acquire the diabetes knowledge and skills for self care.

Integrating hospital medical care data with pharmaceutical education materials for diabetes self management.

Diabetic patients need long-term treatment and follow-up exams as well as appropriate self-care pharmaceutical education to get the disease under control and to prevent possible complications. Pharmaceutical treatment plays an essential role in diabetes. If patients don't understand the medicines and dosages they take, their blood glucose control may be affected. In addition, the possibility of developing hypoglycemia may be increased. In this paper, we enhance the POEM system, previously developed for diabetic patient education, by providing diabetic patients' pharmaceutical education. The new system integrates both diabetic patients' pharmaceutical education information and medical care information to provide them with more comprehensive personalized medication information so that they can access the on-line system afterwards. It also strengthens patients' understanding of pharmaceutical functions, side-effects and relevant knowledge thus increasing patients' adherence of medication orders and having better control in their blood glucose levels.