Bridging the Gap Between Consumer eHealth and Public Health Through a Diagnostic Decision Support System

For sound development of the consumer eHealth, the market needs to have proper connection to the public health authority. On the other hand, in public health, tracking of patients has been a bottleneck in the scientific process. To address the problems altogether, we propose an approach to automate the case registration through a diagnosis support system. In the proposed approach, we set up a diagnostic decision support system for physicians, coupled with a support system for patients, on the Internet. In this setting, symptomatic data of anonymized patients automatically accumulate from the physicians' search profile and the patients' reports. Then, researchers in need can find appropriate cases on the symptomatic database, to recruit them for further study. The paper illustrates the case registration model with decision support system, and discusses the pros and cons of the proposed model. The qualitative analysis suggests that the model can accumulate information of cases that cannot be collected at a reasonable cost using traditional approaches.