Session SB2.4

An Intelligent and Integrated Platform for Supporting the Management of Chronic Heart Failure Patients

S Colantonio*, D Conforti, M Martinelli, D Moroni,
F Perticone, O Salvetti, A Sciacqua

ISTI - CNR
Pisa, Italy

Chronic Heart Failure (CHF) is a complex cardiovascular syndrome that would strong benefit from a suitably defined care management program, aimed at improving and personalizing health care by slowing down the progression of the disease, reducing hospitalizations and minimizing risk factors. These can be achieved by a complex clinical workflow that entails identifying, collecting, integrating and processing a huge and diverse amount of biomedical data and information. Within the EU FP6 project HEARTFAID (www.heartfaid.org), an integrated platform of services is being developed to assist HF stakeholders in their routine workflow and to provide an optimal management of HF patients, by exploiting the most advanced technologies, compliant to medical standards, advanced instruments for diagnostic data processing, and significant and up-to-date opportunely formalized knowledge. The main functionalities of the platform are: (i) patients’ telemonitoring; (ii) timely and interactive access to patients’ data; (iii) interpretation of diagnostic investigations; (iv) therapy planning. These mainly rely on the platform intelligence core represented by a Knowledge based Clinical Decision Support System (CDSS) which has been developed by integrating, in functionally advanced settings, (i) deductive knowledge, elicited from guidelines and medical experts; (ii) inductive knowledge, extracted by data mining techniques applied to significant piles of data; (iii) computational methods for the analysis and interpretation of diagnostic data. A significant scenario has been defined for mimicking a real case which covers the clinical course of a patient already enrolled in HEARTFAID platform and continuously telemonitored. The scenario entails the main steps of the patients’ management workflow, leading from visit scheduling to therapeutic choices, and involves the different care operators, e.g., clinicians, sonographers, laboratory analysts. The CDSS core functionalities have been developed to detect early decompensation, assess patient’s status, suggest diagnostic procedures and interpret their results, and plan therapy changes. Such functionalities have been exposed as web services and integrated into a suitably designed user interface which enables to retrieve and display information, patients’ data access, on the fly generation of reports and waveforms, and visualize imaging data.

(Abstract Control Number: 314)