Knowledge based decision support for the management of chronic patients

Due to the current socio-economic impact of chronic diseases, a strong effort is being spent in the development of ICT applications able to support a new care paradigm specialized for chronic patients. Such applications are mainly based on patients' telemonitoring for the collection of a number of relevant physiological parameters aimed at identifying and preventing acute events, while maximizing patients' quality of life and reducing clinical costs. The most advanced and challenging features of these ICT applications are intelligent services devoted to the interpretation of monitored patients' data for supporting clinicians in their routine management of chronic patients. In this paper, a Knowledge-based Clinical Decision Support System (KB-CDSS) is presented, which is aimed at aiding clinical professionals in managing chronic patients on a daily basis, by assessing their current status, helping face their worsening conditions, and preventing disease exacerbation events. The CDSS has been developed by encoding the relevant knowledge elicited from clinicians who have a large experience in patients' monitoring. A formalism based on ontologies and rules was selected to build the Knowledge Base according to a scenario based approach. The system is currently under validation for the management of real clinical cases.