Longitudinal patient-centered collection and analysis of clinical data

Most available computer-assisted clinical questionnaire systems are generally designed to be used by the medical practitioner, rather than the patient. The Web-based questionnaire system presented: is designed to elicit clinical information directly from the patient; is entirely governed by logical specifications which are dynamically retrieved from a database; makes information gathering efficient, both in terms of the precision with which the forms content is selected to be presented to the user, and in terms of presentation speed; and is free of medical bias in its administration. A patient-centered approach also affects the analysis of collected data. When a questionnaire is managed by healthcare providers, they are the experts and do the analysis of clinical data with their medical wisdom. With an approach based on a global collection of clinical data directly from patients over time, new data analysis tools are needed to generate medical information. Our approach aims to extract more general medical concepts such as the detection of early stage of disease. The clinical data analysis engine presented: uses a variety of built-in medical wisdom such as medical pathways, scoring or analysis of symptoms over time; can be directed either towards a given patient's health or a large sample of patients for data mining; and generates medical information out of collected clinical data for a variety of users, the patients themselves, their caregivers or medical researchers.