Decision support based needs assessment for cancer patients

Abstract

Regular assessment of wellness or quality of life for patients throughout a cancer journey is important so as to identify aspects of life that could lead to distress and impede recovery or acceptance. The emerging trends in assessment are to deploy validated, quality of life instruments on touchscreen computers in medical waiting rooms. However, these add to workload of health care professionals and can be impersonal for patients to use. In this article, an alternate approach is presented that involves a decision support system with natural dialogue that elicits the patient's specific context in a far finer grained manner than is possible with questionnaire based instruments. The system includes a model of heuristics that health care professionals in a locality use to make inferences regarding a patient's quality of life and avenues for referral.E