Designing HeartCare: custom computerized home care for patients recovering from CABG surgery.

With the current trend toward discharge of cardiac artery bypass graft (CABG) patients from the hospital after 5 days, clinicians must make effective use of existing computer technology to provide more efficiently the services once available during the patient's lengthier hospital stay. This paper describes the design of the HeartCare initiative, a computerized cardiac recovery service designed to provide home-care support for patients in the first three months following CABG surgery. Capitalizing on the expansion in health resources on the Internet, and building on the lessons from the ComputerLink projects, HeartCare will employ the World Wide Web platform in the generation of personalized in-home computerized access to recovery resources. Key implementation decisions include selection of WebTV/ as the home-based device, and application of Metadata to organizing health-related knowledge resources on the WWW.