EMPOWER - Support of Patient Empowerment by an intelligent self-management pathway for patients

Patient Empowerment involves patients to a greater extent in their own healthcare process and disease management becomes an integrated part of their daily life. The capability of self-management opens the possibility for patients not only to contribute to their own healthcare but also to be more in control of their disease. EMPOWER will develop a modular and standard-based Patient Empowerment Framework which facilitates the self-management of diabetes patients based on PHRs and on context-aware, personalized services. EMPOWER focuses the research and development efforts on a patient-centric perspective that also involves healthcare professionals. EMPOWER provides knowledge-based Self-Management Pathways for diabetes patients and this includes

(1)services for the specification and execution of actions to change behaviour according to diabetes-specific health care needs and
(2)services for monitoring of vital, physical, mental parameters as well as physical and lifestyle activities based on health standards.

EMPOWER semantically integrates multiple information sources (EHR/PHR, diabetes guidelines, patterns of daily living) for a shared knowledge model. The Self-Management Pathways facilitate the specification of recommendations that allow specifying individual goals for the patient. Based on these goals, relevant information and their preferences patients can specify their individual diabetes-specific actions. The Self-Management Pathways are an iterative process where executed actions and reported patterns of daily life can be evaluated. Recommendations, goals and actions can be updated iteratively according to current needs and preferences. Finally, the services in EMPOWER will embrace semantic interoperability based on health standards e.g. HL7 and IHE profiles. A pilot application in Turkey (hosted by the Ministry of Health) and one in Germany (hosted by a network of GPs) will demonstrate that EMPOWER can interoperate with other health applications.