Jerry B. Weinberg, Ph. D.
Acting Associate Provost for Research and
Dean The Graduate School

Treatment of chronic medical conditions such as hypertension requires continual monitoring plus appropriate pharmaceutical dosage alterations, especially in the early stages of treatment. Frequent doctor visits are needed to properly monitor blood pressure levels and drug side effects. The visits required to gather sufficient readings for optimal diagnoses are not feasible for many patients, particularly in rural areas. The Internet provides an alternative for patients and doctors to interact in the management of hypertension and other chronic conditions. Reporting progress in an on-line environment can reduce the number of visits needed while allowing more frequent recording of measurements. This provides more data, enabling more accurate treatment decisions.The system developed for this project, the Hypertension Decision Aide (HDA), provides this service.It allows patients to remotely report vital sign measurements as well as other signs and symptoms.It allows physicians to graphically monitor patient progress and perform routine maintenance of patient data via the Web. HDA allows patients more active involvement in their own care, which should increase treatment compliance. To aid the physician in analyzing the increased amount of patient data, HDA is designed to interact with an expert system that will provide decision support by analyzing patient medical history and trends of reported data.

Unlike most static, stateless Web systems, HDA must provide a variety of dynamic services.Database connectivity is required to store patient data, and security is needed for patient confidentiality.Data-driven charts must provide graphical means for patient monitoring while an expert system requires processing beyond static webpage delivery.To do this,HDA is implemented with Active Server Pages (ASP) technology.

Hypertension Decision Aide: An Intelligent Web-Based System for the Treatment of Hypertension Patients

Steve Klein

Abstract