Comprehensive Health Enhancement Support System - CHESS
Comprehensive Health Enhancement Support System (CHESS) is a computer-based system of integrated services designed to help patients suffering from a life-threatening disease such as breast cancer, HIV infection, heart disease, Alzheimer's disease, or alcoholism. It was designed to help them improve their health through education at home via personal computer. This support system was 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 a support system developed to improve life quality of patients suffering from life-threatening diseases, other 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 to 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 only one tool can be used at a time. All patients receive the same information, so there is no way to individualize the information received. 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.
