Providing patients and their carers with adequate information on their condition is an integral duty of modern, patient-centred healthcare.
Providing patients and their carers with adequate information on their condition is an integral duty of modern, patient-centred healthcare. Among the key challenges for any patient education activity is to utilize material that is relevant to the particular patient, instead of relying on ‘one-size-fits-all’ methods. Furthermore, to accommodate the often frantic pace of health care practice, such material needs to be readily available at the time and place that it is needed. This PhD thesis reports on a novel approach to patient education: STEPPS, Structured Evaluated Personalized Patient Support. The STEPPS system links two pivotal information repositories: the electronic patient record and the abundance of health information on the Internet. Through matching the structured and coded data of a patient case with online health resources, STEPPS automates a process crucial to effective patient education - the swift personalization of information. The basic STEPPS, i.e. the elements involved, aspects of quality and trust in online health information, the system architecture, and a pilot evaluation study are described in this book, demonstrated through an application in the field of burn care