Comprehensive Health Enhancement Support System - CHESS
CHESS - Comprehensive Health Enhancement Support System
CHESS is a system designed for patients suffering from a life-threatening disease such as breast cancer, HIV infection, heart disease, Alzheimer's disease, or alcoholism, who can educate themselves from home using their personal computer and improve their health. This support system is developed at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. An AHRQ study of HIV patients who used CHESS showed that they had fewer hospitalizations and a higher quality of life than patients who received only standard medical treatment.
Although CHESS was primarily support system developed to improve life quality of patients suffering from life-threatening diseases, others CHESS-like applications such as Stomp Out Smokes (SOS) have been proven to stimulate a desire to quit smoking of over 70% of users participant of interactive cessions. In contrast of CHESS targeting adults, SOS focussed on adolescent health behavior change.
One of the problems with CHESS is that each component of the system stands individually, which means that you can only use one tool at a time. There is no way to individualize the patient care, all patients receive the same information. Information entered by the user cannot be shared with other parts of the system.
Reference:
- Gustafson DH, Hawkins R, Boberg E, et al. Impact of a patient-centered, computer-based health information/support system. Am J Prev Med 1999; 16(1):1-9.
- https://chess.wisc.edu/chess/home/home.aspx
- http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/picrender.fcgi?artid=2063436&blobtype=pdf
- Susan W. McRoy, Alfredo Liu-Perez, Syed S. Ali. Interactive Computerized Health Care Education. J Am Med Inform Assoc. 1998 Jul–Aug; 5(4): 347–356.