Decision support system for monitoring hypertensive patients in a comorbid condition

Increasing more patients (especially the elderly) suffering from comorbid diseases motivates us to develop a decision support system which can combine multiple concurrently applied disease-specific clinical practice guidelines. Combining multiple guidelines is not naively running each guideline one by one. Instead, the occurance of potential conflicts between guidelines must be detected and mitigated by a decision support system. In this paper, we present the design of a telecommunication and computer technology based system for monitoring hypertensive patients in the presence of a comorbid condition. The core of this system is a decision support unit, which performs combining of guidelines for different diseases in view of the potential conflict occurring. The architecture of our system, including this decision support unit, is detailed in this paper. To show the reliability of our system, we analyze the ability of a decision support system to correctly make decisions as well as to detect the conflict between guidelines.