A Self-Management Service Framework to Support Chronic Disease Patients' Self-Management

2.1. Background

Improvement of medical practice has resulted in successful treatment and cure of more diseases. However chronic diseases, which have gradual progression and long-term fluctuation and difficulty in treatment, are still major healthcare problems (Holman & Lorig, 2004). Self-management is an essential process for improving care of patients with chronic diseases. Self-management usually includes dynamic and continuous self-care activities of a patient to manage his or her daily life, disease and consequences to allow the patient to live well with a chronic disease or condition (Barlow, Wright, Sheasby, Turner, & Hainsworth, 2002).

Information and communication technologies (ICTs) are widely employed in many applications for improving quality of services. ICTs are increasingly adopted in healthcare systems (Glasgow, Bull, Piette, & Steiner, 2004) including systems with self-management support functions (Garcia-Lizana & Sarria-Santamera, 2007). There are various functions found in different self-management support systems for different chronic diseases and conditions (Barlow et al., 2002; Clark et al., 1991). This study aims to survey these systems and develop a conceptual model of functions of self-management support systems.

2.2. Survey Methods

The Medline database and the Google search engine were used for online full-text literature searching. The search terms were “chronic” and “self-management”. The aim was to collect at least 40 literatures that fulfill the criteria for survey in the basis of first-come-first-served. Selections of publications were based on the following inclusion criteria:

• 1.

  Self-management system for chronic diseases or conditions was used.

• 2.

  There are some uses of ICTs in the self-management system.

• 3.

  Acceptable applications of ICTs include the Internet, automated telephone, and telemedicine systems.

The exclusion criteria are:

• 1.

  The literature contains no information about functions of the self-management system.

• 2.

  The literature that only reviewed other self-management systems.

Each of the studied literatures was thoroughly searched for self-management functions. Only the functions mentioned in the article are collected. The functions found in the included literatures were grouped and categorized. The conceptual model that generalized the functions was consequently developed.