SAIApp: a web application of the university of palermo dedicated to children with autoinflammatory syndromes

Abstract

Introduction: The recent epidemic strongly evidenced the necessity of reorganizing physician work, patients’ access to clinics and patient support, especially for chronic diseases. In this field, a good strategy must consider the integration between department pediatricians, multidisciplinary specialists and pediatricians in private practice. Besides, adequate standards of care must be ensured especially for children affected by chronic diseases, as Autoinflammatory syndromes. Objectives: These children need to monitor clinical manifestations, attacks-free intervals, treatment adherence and response, onset of short- and long-term complications. This surveillance is a fundamental step to guarantee the best and personalized therapeutic choice, to update the therapeutic plan and to monitor adverse events. In this framework, a cutting-age strategy must adopt web applications, running on personal devices as tablet or smartphone. Methods: SAIApp is a web application written in Python using the Django framework. The app’s data layer relies on a relational DBMS implemented in SQLite, while its presentation layer makes use of Bootstrap to guarantee full responsiveness even for small-screen devices. The mobile version has been designed just as a “webapp” that is a mobile app that simply shows a frame where HTML browsing still takes place. This choice is due to the very low computational load involved in SAIApp: it does not use any sensor of the mobile device, and no particular time constraints are required for the user interaction thus allowing for the use of web GUI widgets. The application considers three main actors: the patient or her/his family, the department pediatrician, and the pediatrician in private practice that has been appointed by the patient as her/his reference physician. All of them are registered users of the application but with different roles and grants on the database. The patient can only specify her/his health status by answering a series of simple Yes/No questions about the presence of some symptoms like fever, headache, vomit, constipation, and so on. Moreover, the patient can provide a qualitative evaluation of the overall health status through an easy GUI made by a list of emoj expressing increasing levels of satisfaction. Each health status report has a timestamp, and it is the main source of information to be stored in the database. Results: The department pediatrician acts as the administrator of the system. He registers the new users belonging to the other two groups and inserts the clinical data. The department pediatrician fills the records related to the first diagnosis, to therapy along with the results of clinical examinations. Finally, the department pediatrician owns a GUI to perform search in the patients list according to several criteria. The result can be exported as a csv file for further analysis. Conclusion: The pediatrician in private practice supports the work of the department pediatrician as she/he can insert and search for all the clinical data, related only to her/his patients. In this way, we want virtually extend the assistance to children with Autoinflammatory syndromes and guarantee adequate standards of care.