NAOMI - screencast patient and relatives application (with subtitles)
The Intensive Care Unit (ICU) of the Ghent University Hospital is responsible for the treatment of patients with acute, life-threatening disorders. The patient is constantly monitored by a team of doctors and nurses. During the hospitalization of a patient at the ICU, the patient's relatives experience a lot of stress. The medical staff of the Ghent University Hospital tries to comfort and support the family members by offering specific information about the patient’s situation. Currently, this is being performed verbally, supported by paper brochures. However, during this stressful period the family members tend to forget the given information. The given brochures, which are also available on-line, are created for broad categories of pathologies, to ensure usability for a large group of patients. Consequently, the brochures contain a plethora of information that is not applicable to the particular patient's condition. As such, the family members tend to be drowned in non-specific and detail information. To enrich their knowledge about the patient's pathology, they then tend to search the Web for more information, e.g., using Symptom Checker. This often leads to misconceptions and more worry because the found material is not personalized and contains too much information that does not apply to the specific situation or treatment of the patient.
To counter these issues, we have designed a patient information system, called NAOMI, to support communication between the medical staff and the patient's relatives about the patient's condition. NAOMI allows the medical staff to upload brochures. These are semi-automatically annotated according to pre-defined, fine-grained categories. When a patient is admitted to the ICU or his/her condition is updated in the electronic patient record (EPD) of the hospital, his/her pathology and/or symptoms are automatically mapped on these annotations. As such, only relevant sections of the brochures are provided as information to the relatives. In this way, NAOMI provides a source of information that is personalized to the patient’s current condition.