Learning Solution

To design a tool that would:
• Enable the patient to better articulate their symptoms
• Provide a contextual explanation of causes, symptoms, tests and treatment.
• Provide a contextual resource that would explain medical terms and processes.
• Provide a peer-peer disease management solution resource.
• Educate the patient about the physician's mental model for diagnosis and treatment.
• Initiate the patient into a "learning community" of other patients with similar medical concerns.

Impact of Learning
• Empowers the patient to be a more informed receiver of healthcare.
• Enlarges the information source to resources outside of the physician
• Enables the patient to receive ubiquitous 24-hour triage service.
• Provides the patient with ubiquitous access to knowledge and customized education.
• Creates a community of learner-patients and encourages collaborative learning and problem solving.

Problem Context (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.

Problem Context (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.