CarePaths

When a patient self identifies a diagnosis at the start of an encounter, appropriate questions related to the condition are presented. A CarePath will help determine if the patient has that condition or if it could be something else.

CarePaths makes it easy for patients to use our comprehensive clinical vocabulary at the beginning of a telemedicine encounter to address known or suspected conditions like bladder infection, allergies, or sinusitis. Patients simply select from one of the common problems or type a brief description of their symptoms.

Here is an example use case scenario of a CarePath. This example illustrates how a CarePath might be used in a telemedicine encounter:

Mike Gomez is 21-year male old who recently visited a friend’s lake cottage two days ago and was swimming. He has moderate pain in his left ear for the last 2 days. He has no runny nose or cough or other symptoms. The pain gets worse when he pulls on that ear. He has had something similar before and was told it was swimmer’s ear.

He launches the telemedicine application on his cell phone. He selects the problem “Swimmer’s Ear” and the application asks him a series of questions from the CarePath – Swimmer’s Ear. The questions are organized and presented as an easy-to-read rapid medical history. The application stores Mike’s responses and sends the data on to a telemedicine provider (e.g., doctor, PA, NP) for review. He also takes a picture of his outer ear and uploads it into the application.

Dr. Karen White, a telemedicine doctor, first reviews all the information provided by Mike using the telemedicine application. The data is presented to her in SOAP format. Dr. White then starts a telemedicine encounter, talks with Mike directly, asking him a couple clarifying questions.

Dr. White makes the diagnosis of swimmer’s ear (otitis externa). She electronically prescribes ear drops containing an antibiotic-steroid combination and also sends Mike targeted care advice and call back instructions for this problem.

If the patient didn’t have any of the symptoms of the diagnosis he entered, an application would terminate this CarePath with appropriate scripting and ask the patient what symptoms they are having.

The screen may look something like this.

 

Here is a sample user interface of questions that would be presented to the patient during the CarePath.