Web-based visualization of guidelines and drug use in epilepsy : a project contributing to smart drug prescriptions

Epilepsy is a chronic brain disease with unpredictable recurrence of seizures. It is not a curable disease, and the treatment for it is long and often difficult for the patient. Over the years, healthcare professionals have developed a set of guidelines for treating epilepsy. Improving patient’s care is of great importance to Kempenhaeghe. This report describes a project to analyze and interpret epilepsy-related information, and to design a system that provides valuable feedback for healthcare professionals and patients to improve treatment via the use of visualization techniques. A formal model of the epilepsy information and guidelines is developed, and coupled with a prototype. The prototype supports checking conformance of doctors’ prescriptions against the epilepsy guidelines, checking of future prescriptions for conformance and patient-specific applicability, and exploring patient’s care journey with epilepsy. This is supported with visualizations that provide the user with immediate data interpretation and feedback. The project lists also several suggestions for future improvements.