Improving Self-Care and Health Literacy in Hemodialysis Patients: Using Software Engineering

The use of Computer Science in order to categorize and store information, improve diagnostic and therapeutic procedures, patient education and the training of a skilled labor force, has taken important steps and there are constantly new developments in this area. One of the features of computer science in medicine is patients´ education and care team-training. Low health literacy is a common issue through chronic hemodialysis patients and associates with higher mortality. In order to provide high-quality education for hemodialysis patients, and subsequently to increase their cooperation in self-care, the patient-specific part of “Virtual Physician in Hemodialysis Ward Software (VPh-soft)” has been developed. The original software was first introduced three years ago and now the purpose of this paper is to introduce its new sections and their beneficial impacts on medicine. This new software has five special features. These capabilities can be summarized as bellow: · Advise patients by interpreting lab results · Nutritional Counseling · Patient education · Archive and keep track of patient information · Data transfer for research projects Now we are going to explain briefly these main end-uses of this software.