In cooperation with the Austrian Society for Rheumatology the project partners have developed a software for structured reporting of rheumatic diseases.

The goal has been to offer general practitioners an easy-to-handle tool for a computer-based documentation of patient data covering the most important findings and symptoms for rheumatic diseases. An integration of the software in existing computer environments should be feasible and a basic differential diagnosis should be offered. The basic documentation consists of several data input screens (administrative patient data, history of illness, clinical data, laboratory exams, X-ray findings). The differential diagnosis spectrum comprises the following major groups of rheumatologic diseases:

1. back pain due to mechanical trauma,
2. inflammatory diseases of spine,
3. disease of the spine due to metabolic disorders,
4. inflammatory joint diseases,
5. metabolic joint diseases,
6. degenerative joint diseases, and Rheumatologic soft tissue diseases.

Indistinct cases a further differential diagnosis support is provided (suspicion of chronic polyarthritis, psoriatric arthropathy, etc.). As a result, a number of diagnostic hypotheses (with a maximum of three diagnosis) are presented. In addition, the system contains an international classification scheme of rheumatological diseases.

Evaluation: In an evaluation study 75 patients were tested and the overall accuracy of the top-level diagnostic hypothesis generated by the system was 91%. However, sensitivity and specificity vary considerable among the various diagnostic groups. As an example, the study showed that the sensivity of well-defined disorders (e. g. Chronic polyarthritis) reaches almost 100%, whereas it is as low as 50% in some other diseases (e. g. gout) whose characteristic findings and symptoms are suppressed by treatment (drug medication) in many cases.

Rheumexpert (CD-Rom)

In cooperation with the Austrian Society for Rheumatology, Rheumexpert was developed by the Department of Medical Computer Sciences, University of Vienna and the Clinic for Rheumatic Diseases of the Social Security Insurance Company for Trade and Industry.

Core Unit for Medical Statistics and Informatics (MSI), Medical University of Vienna, Spitalg. 23, A-1090 Vienna, Phone: +43-1-40400-6668, Internet: http://www.meduniwien.ac.at/msi/mes/