Development of an Integrated Health Improvement Support System

Increased health care costs due to the rising incidence of lifestyle diseases have become a problem in Japan. In order to reduce these costs, early treatment and improvements in diet through nutrition assessments by dietitians are important. To this end, cooperation between patients, physicians and dietitians is necessary. However, currently a dietitian must ask a patient about information that may already be described in his or her health record. So efficiency would be increased if the dietitian could refer directly to the patient's health records by way of an electronic system. In this research, we designed, tested, and evaluated an integrated health improvement support system (IHISS) that includes a dietitian consultation support function in coordination with an electronic health record system, as well as an at-home nutrition management support function that can be used by the dietitian to display a patient's recorded meal choices. The results of our evaluation of each function of the IHISS are provided.