Patient empowerment by increasing information accessibility in a telecare system.

Patient empowerment is important in order to increase the quality of the medical care and the life quality of the patients. In this respect, the paper describes how a telecare system can become more "friendly" with the assisted persons (elderly people or post-discharged patients) due to a specific feature addressing the patient access to information from medical texts. The according service is part of the server of a tele-care/tele-assistance system (TELEASIS) and adapts the medical text to "patient" lay person language, contributing in this respect to the patient empowerment process. This component is based on an original terminology interpretation engine which is being briefly described in this paper. The TELEASIS system has a specific interface dedicated to medical personnel allowing the addition and assignment of medical text to patients or group of patients, which can be later accessed by the patients adapted to a patient friendly language. The medial texts are saved on a central medical information database which contains different content formats (text, multimedia, videos). As a conclusion, the adapted information available for the assisted persons and the communication channels established in the system increase the possibility of patients being better informed on their health status.