The Health Condition Timeline as a Model for Pregnancy Disease Management

Process flow diagrams like caremaps are common in clinical practice guidelines and treatment texts. However, their context is often limited to a single diagnostic or treatment event. While a method has been proposed for creating a health and disease lifecycle called the health condition timeline (HCT), that method is yet to be demonstrated for an entire health condition. This paper investigates development of an HCT for gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM), and whether the HCT and caremaps it incorporates can be used to support patient care to develop decision support tools. We show that this approach can be used to expedite development of clinical decision-support and clinician- and patient-facing applications. Caremaps, HCT and the decision support tools created with them could improve patient awareness for their condition and reduce the impact of their disease on themselves and the limited resources of our healthcare systems.