Fraunhofer Cluster of Excellence Immune-Mediated Diseases
The therapeutic landscape of immune-mediated diseases is changing rapidly, due to the development of therapies with targeted disease-modifying mechanisms such as biological therapies and synthetic DMARDs (Disease-Modifying Antirheumatic Drugs). It can be assumed that the number of therapeutic options will continue to increase in the future and that physicians will have a multitude of treatment options at their disposal. It is thus difficult to keep track of the advantages and disadvantages of the different therapeutic options and this influences the clinical decision-making process for the best possible individualized and targeted therapy for each patient.
Doctor and patient information system
One immune-mediated disease is psoriasis arthritis, which can present with a broad variety of symptoms. These include joint complaints due to arthritis, inflammation of entire fingers or toes (dactylitis), and involvement of tendons (enthesitis) and/or the spine. A doctor and patient information system with fast access would make sense here, to allow fast and efficient information retrieval about prevalent expert opinions. This information can then be combined with the doctor’s own knowledge from experience, guidelines and from study data, enabling long-term improvement of the patient’s therapy. An interactive user interface shall allow the patient's individual needs and disease pattern to be taken into account when retrieving information.
Flexible design
Prior to implementing the therapy information system for psoriasis arthritis, a framework shall be created that can be used flexibly for other diseases as well. As the increasing number of drugs leads to potential knowledge gaps in the context of other diseases (e. g. bronchial asthma, multiple sclerosis, etc.) as well, for example, regarding the efficacy of drugs with different manifestations, the information system should be modular and, if possible, adaptable to other diseases without in-depth programming knowledge. System maintenance and updating with new information should also be taken into account during development of the framework. In single modules, the framework will combine all functions for the visualization of the information of interest, thus providing the user interface of the application. Another component of the framework will be the development of a generalized format to represent knowledge from different sources (e.g. guidelines, scientific publications, red list, grey literature etc.) and adaptation of the modules of the user interface for information presentation to this format.