Learning Problems

• Patients are poor articulators of their symptoms and medical condition hence providing incomplete information to their healthcare providers.
• Patients are poorly educated about the causes, symptoms and treatment of their medical condition.
• Patients are poorly educated about the process of diagnosis and disease management.
• Patient are not informed co-partners with their physician when it comes to healthcare decision making.
• Patients are not motivated to learn about their health outside of a crisis situation.
• Patients do not keep track of their medical history hence providing discontinuous information to their healthcare provider.
• Doctor's do not provide emotional and lifestyle management support education for ongoing medical problems.

Learning Goals
• To help reduce the inaccuracy of diagnosis via incorrectly articulated or overlooked symptoms
• To maximize the interaction time during doctor visits by educating patients prior to the visit.
• To improve doctor- patient communicating by providing a common vocabulary of medical terms.
• To use education as a means to reduce anxiety due to not knowing the meaning of symptoms.
• To improve the doctor patient communication by providing a common set of vocabulary and conceptual model for both physician and patient.
• To improve the diagnosis process by helping the patient articulates their symptoms.
• To provide a ubiquitous triage tool (disguised as an educational tool) for patients to turn to in between visits to their physician.


Interaction Problem ( Patient's Perspective )
• Patients with non-emergent medical problems have to wait for weeks to get an appointment to see their physician.
• Patients with potentially emergent medical problems are unaware of the urgent nature of their symptoms and do not go into the emergency room because of the inconvenience.

Interaction Problem ( Doctor's Perspective )
• Essential first contact with patient to more maximally optimize use of healthcare delivery resources
• Decrease unnecessary use of expensive acute care resources, e.g. ambulance, ER, urgent care
• Increasing appropriate utilization of resources best able to solve patient’s problem: ER, urgent care, specialist, generalist, triage nurse follow-up, home care
• Increasing patient satisfaction
•”If patients could communicate with physicians or be monitored through the Internet, more than 20% of in-office visits could be eliminated.“