Enhanced care of hypertensive patients using the Internet.
BACKGROUND
Medical guidelines provide recommendations that ought to help physicians in medical decision-making under different circumstances. To develop electronic medical guidelines and to make them available for physicians using the Internet can further enhance the quality and efficiency of health care, especially with the simultaneous use of electronic health records.


OBJECTIVE
This study aims to outline the needs for web-based systems that support the use of medical guidelines in practice; and to focus on the development of web-based electronic medical guidelines for treatment of arterial hypertension.


METHODS
The importance of electronic health record in cardiology for data acquisition, data storage and data mining is considered. The anonymized database of approximately 1800 hypertensive patients has been created to compare medical practice with guidelines and discover features of diseases that can help with their management. Using this database we evaluated several web-based electronic guidelines systems.


RESULTS
The 1999 WHO/ISH Guidelines for the Management of Hypertension were formalized and interpreted using the Guide-X methodology, using the Apollo system and web-based electronic guidelines. The web-based electronic guidelines were tested on the smaller anonymous recent data set of 840 hypertensive patients.


CONCLUSIONS
An easy transfer of knowledge from medical guidelines to structured electronic guidelines opens new possibilities for easy reusability of medical knowledge by general practitioners and clinicians.
Zvarova
Jana
J
European Centre for Medical Informatics, Statistics and Epidemiology, Institute of Computer Science AS CR, Pod Vodarenskou Vezi 2, 182 07 Prague, The Czech Republic. zvarova@euromise.cz
Peleska
Jan
J
Hanzlicek
Petr
P
Zvara
Karel
K
D002309:Cardiology; D018153:Czech Republic; D006801:Humans; D006973:Hypertension / Q000628:therapy*; D020407:Internet; D008490:Medical Informatics; D016347:Medical Records Systems, Computerized; D017410:Practice Guidelines as Topic; D011787:Quality of Health Care