A Context-Aware framework for patient Navigation and Engagement (CANE)

Abstract

Engaging patients in the management of their health care can improve the quality of their care and enhance their experience while making more efficient use of care provider resources, especially for chronic diseases. However, health care system complexity and the challenge of consumer health literacy hinder greater engagement. In this paper, we propose a Context-Aware patient Navigation and Engagement (CANE) framework to support informed decision making and more efficient use of health care services. We use the BPMN 2.0 workflow language to formalize the description of navigation processes derived from medical guidelines and develop a healthcare network ontology to assist patient understanding of various clinical activities from multiple perspectives (e.g., resource, logistics, financial, and time). A running example of type 2 diabetes management is used to illustrate our CANE framework. Finally, we describe the system architecture of our prototype.