Development of an Interactive Empowerment Tool in Support of Patient Empowerment.

The study is intended to develop an IEm (Interactive Empowerment) tool aimed at enhancing physician-patient experience by providing physicians a personalized patient's profile, accompanied by a list of recommendations to suggest him how to interact with that specific patient on the basis of his/her personal profile. Developed in the framework of the FP7 project "P-Medicine", the IEm tool uses the ALGA-BC questionnaire, a recent validated instrument specifically developed to perform a brief evaluation of the breast cancer patients' psychological status, to provide the physician a patient's profile based on 8 factors. As soon as the questionnaire has been completed, the patient's answers are automatically elaborated and sent to the physician's computer. Provided to the physicians at the very beginning of the visit, such information is supposed to be crucial for them to find a tailored way to communicate with the patient. Moreover, in order to help physicians to correctly interpret the patient's score, any time the scores are out of a certain range (normal values) they will receive a recommendation that helps them to find the best way to interact with the patient. Supposing that the patient empowerment can be reached through the improved patient's participation in the clinical process, we argue that a more effective and personalized interaction between patient and physician may have a key role in promoting it.