A Platform for Assessing Cancer Patients’ Quality of Life - New Contributions in Information Systems and Technologies - page 55

There are also other variables that can be potential predictors, such as: Educational
Level; Tracheostomy; Liters of wine per day and Voice prosthesis. The model is
significant (F(18, 97) = 3.85; p value < 0.001) and explain 31% of the variability of
the Quality of Life.

6 Conclusions and Future Work

The platform developed aims to implement, monitor and promote the automatic
correction of errors and exceptions that may occur during the execution of the
different diagnoses and prescriptions. Moreover, QoLis platform answer several
questions and requirements in terms of registration and knowledge discovery. QoLis
provides to the healthcare professionals a multidimensional analysis tools that allow
them to analyze all the surrounding variables and cross them with the typical variables
arising from questionnaires used to measure quality of life. The platform also
provides tools that enable healthcare professionals to apply predictive modeling and
simulation of the behavior of users to treatments based on the change of the variables
considered. The perception that a given set of treatments, usually expensive, has a
negative effect on the quality of life of patients can be used to change the plans, in
particular, keeping the patient in less costly palliative care, with gains for the patient
quality of life and lower costs to the institution. 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. In fact,
variables that should be consider by the physicians for the Quality of Life of patients
are years of smoking and size of the tumor. These variables are the most significant
after analyzing the data of a set of 18 variables.
In future the platform will provide to the healthcare professionals the access to
information on any mobile device, allowing its proximity to its users within which
they operate. The availability of the platform in a browser will allow patients to take
the questionnaires at home. In addition the patients, clinicians and nurses will receive
immediate feedback from the results. Based on these results clinicians may be, for
example, advance or postpone a consultation.

Acknowledgments. This work was funded by QoLis - Quality of Life Platform
Project, Nº2013/34034 QREN SI I&DT, (NUP, NORTE-07-0202-FEDER-034Ú34).
The authors also acknowledge: LIACC (PEst-OE/EEI/UI0027/2014).

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