A Platform for Assessing Cancer Patients’ Quality of Life - New Contributions in Information Systems and Technologies - page 46

A Platform for Assessing Cancer Patients' Quality of Life

Brígida Mónica Faria 1,2,3 , Joaquim Gonçalves 1,4 , Luís Paulo Reis 1,5 ,
and Álvaro Rocha 1,6

1 LIACC - Lab. Inteligencia Artificial e Ciência de Computadores, Porto, Portugal
2 ESTSP/IPP - Esc. Sup. de Tecnologia da Saúde do Porto / Inst. Polit. do Porto, Portugal
3 IEETA - Instituto de Engenharia Electrónica e Telemática de Aveiro, Aveiro, Portugal
4 EST/IPCA - Esc. Superior de Tecnologia/Instituto Politécnico do Cávado e do Ave
5 EEUM/DSI - Escola de Engenharia da Universidade do Minho, Guimarães, Portugal
6 DEI/UC - Departamento de Engenharia Informática, Univ. Coimbra, Portugal
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Abstract. In general, quality of life is the perceived quality of an individual's
daily life, that is, an assessment of their well-being or lack thereof. Life quality
of individuals is very important for involves several factors such as social,
economic, psychological, spiritual or medical state. The information
technologies can help with the management of the services for the healthcare of
chronic patients. It was developed and implemented a Quality of Life platform
using information technologies and with application of statistical methods to
access the information of clinical data of patients with cancer from
otorhinolaryngology and Head and Neck services of an oncologic institution.
The sample was composed of 3013 patients. The results show that there are
variables with significant predictors for the Quality of Life: years of smoking
(p value 0.049) and size of the tumor (p value < 0.001). In conclusion statistical
methods allow having access to additional information helping the physicians to
be able to know the quality of life and produce a well-informed clinical
decision.

Keywords: life quality, cancer, information technology, statistics.

1 Introduction

Information Technology (IT) in health is fundamental to the success of care
management [1] and there are several good examples of IT systems applications
especially in Clinical Decision Support Systems (CDSS). However, the significant
growth in the use of IT in healthcare is not accompanied by the same proportion in
health benefits. The main reason for this is related with the fact that Knowledge
Management Systems are not properly integrated. The use of IT enabled a significant
increase in the amount of information available, constituting the main reason for the
development of the CDSS. The volume and complex nature of the data justifies the
use of robust models capable of transforming information into knowledge. The
expectation is that by providing relevant data and knowledge at the point of health