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.