After a successful pitch of mICF in the Dutch Hackethon, a team worked out a mock up to build an interface for mICF. The team used the case of Tineke, a patient suffering from spinal cord disease, having a dream: travelling to Rome. But when she wanted advice on how she could travel to Rome without any medical dangers, the healthcare professional simply pointed out that her medical issues would prevent her from doing so. While healthcare professionals deal with patients and their health problems, patients view themselves as people with goals, needs, wishes and dreams. During a consult these views are not always aligned. Hence, opportunities to increase a patient’s quality of life might be missed.
We used this case to come up with a goal oriented interface that aims to help a patient communicate his or her own goals and dreams related to health with a health care professional and together make the right decisions in order to reaching, for example, Rome. With Reaching Rome a patient can get feedback about their own health status and prepare for their consult by collecting all information and data on his/her personal situation and issues that might arise while trying to reach their goals. As the back end of the application is connected with the Term Editor which includes the ICF, healthcare professionals and patients can communicate and speak the same language.
By Gonda Stallinga, Tineke Dirks, Louis Overgoor, Marika Leving, Jeroen Beijsterveld, Mieke Boelens, Inge Tuitert