Information for guided chronic disease self-management in community settings

The World Health Organisation's framework for innovative care of chronic diseases identifies self-management support as part of the building blocks for effective health care organisations (World Health Organisation, 2002). This project reports on initial research involving interviewing key stakeholders on attitudes to Guided Chronic Disease Self Management (GCDSM) as a step towards developing an information architecture to support guided patient self-management of chronic disease. Few chronic disease sufferers are provided with care plans and there are few means for monitoring compliance. Self-management programmes that exist tend to be focused on specific diseases with no common information architecture and few means of sharing information across carers and between clinicians, carers, patients and their families. As patients age and accumulate co-morbidities they need to interact with the various different means that information providers have to assist them. This research-in-progress aims to identify requirements for a generic architecture for chronic disease guided self-management to assist the elderly in particular in accessing often critical information in a timely and targeted way to assist self-care. To date consultations have been held with key stakeholder organisations and is reported here. Further research will involve patients, their carers and families.