By Ragnhild Bassøe Gundersen
How can we develop tools to improve patients´ control with their own health, aid doctors in getting a superior overview of their patients´ medical history and at the same time make it possible to track a potential start of an epidemic, by registering and/or typing the medical data once only?
Through a user-centered digital application providing the user with different methods to register symptoms and signs in order to determine a likely diagnosis. Subject to an informed consent from the user, the same data is made available in a unique individual problem-oriented patient record.
Before creating a user-account every user also has to consent to its registered and anonymous data; signs, symptoms and geographical location (i.e. city or city district) being transferred to an epidemiological and research database.
A user-centered digital application that feeds an epidemiological and research database with such anonymous data may contribute significantly to further medical research and help prevent the development of epidemics. Thus epidemiologists and researchers may have been provided som valuable time to develop medicines and vaccines for new diseases, before they get a chance to spread.