HEARTFAID: a knowledge based platform for supporting the clinical management of elderly patients with heart failure

Chronic heart failure is a major health problem in many developed countries with strong social and economic effects due to its prevalence and morbidity. These effects occur particularly in the elderly who have frequent hospital admissions and utilise significant medical resources. Studies and data have demonstrated that evidence-based heart failure management programs utilising appropriate integration of inpatient and outpatient clinical services, have the potential to prevent and reduce hospital admissions, improve clinical status and reduce healthcare costs. HEARTFAID is a research and development project aimed at creating and validating an innovative knowledge-based platform to improve the early diagnosis and effective management of heart failure. The core of the platform is formalisation of pre-existing clinical knowledge and the discovery of new elicited knowledge. HEARTFAID has been designed to improve the processes of diagnosis, prognosis and therapy by providing the following services: • Electronic health records for easy and ubiquitous access to heterogeneous patient data • Integrated services for healthcare professionals, including patient telemonitoring, signal and image processing, alert and alarm systems • Clinical decision support, based on pattern recognition in historical data, knowledge discovery analysis and inference from patients’ clinical data.