Disease burden meter helps chronic patients with lifestyle changes

The principal investigator of the project was Onno van Schayck, Professor of Preventive Medicine at Maastricht University E-manager of Unknown Diseases and an applicant for an IMDI ​​grant. Annerika Slok, Assistant Professor, Faculty of Health, Medicine and Life Sciences at Maastricht University, has now taken over as principal investigator.

‘When a health care provider asks a patient with a chronic illness how things are going, the usual response is: “good!”, Van Schayck begins his story. “The care provider then spends 5 to 10 minutes trying to figure out what’s going wrong. That is true by definition, because the patient has a chronic illness. That’s why we developed the Burden of Disease Meter. Using a simple questionnaire that can be completed quickly, you can use a few general questions and several disease-specific questions to map the patient’s perceived burden of disease.

The next question is ‘What motivates you to work on it, so that you have less burden of disease?’ Then you click on a red balloon together. General advice will then emerge based on national and international guidelines from GPs and specialists. This advice is then turned into a concrete individual care plan. For example, not just ‘move more’ but concretely; Walk the dog at least 3 times a day. The patient can then start working on it, and research has shown that the change is almost always positive. And that encourages the patient to start working on his next complaint.

But that does not mean that the patient will always and automatically follow this for several weeks. Self-regulation is complex; you have to do that with instructions. That is why we are now also working on the development of an E supporter. Support online, for example via smartphone. It is a type of built-in coach. By walking the dog for 10 minutes 3 times a day, you can easily support this online. If the Disease Burden Meter communicates with the E supporter, you can confirm, just like the pedometer, if it is happening. If it doesn’t happen, you can send positive messages to help the patient achieve the goal and then continue.

The main idea of ​​this project was to see if we can extend the Burden of Disease Meter to other diseases. A disease burden meter for chronic conditions such as asthma, diabetes and heart failure. Because more and more people have multiple diseases at the same time. And many lifestyle changes that are necessary to prevent or treat diseases are similar. And a change for one disease affects the other conditions. It is then logical not to reduce a patient to his illness, but to include the patient completely. And also, not to use multiple instruments for all kinds of individual diseases, except for 1 instrument.