Functionalities development for IBD Tool, an italian web-app for Inflammatory Bowel Disease monitoring

This thesis is based on functionalities development for IBD Tool, a web platform created and developed specifically to manage patient monitoring for IBD (Inflammatory Bowel Disease) tele-care. This project was born in 2020 from the collaboration between LINKS Foundation company and the Gastroenterology department of the Mauriziano Hospital in Turin. The main goal of the entire project is a study that wants to demonstrate, using this web platform, how a telemedicine service can offer advantages compared to a traditional care service. Additionally, this project wants to make IBD Tool a gold standard in the clinical practice of IBDs. This thesis aims to enrich the platform with new functionalities supporting the physicians’ requests, to build a more efficient web platform. The platform is based on the automatic administration of specific questionnaires, which assess: the state of the disease (remission or relapse), the effectiveness of therapy, the impact of the disease on the quality of life, and psychological aspects. The various types of questionnaires are sent by email and notified directly by the platform. There are also clinical questionnaires which are filled in by the physician and which are compared with the patients’ ones. The platform composes of two main parts: the backend and the frontend. The backend encapsulates all the logic of the system, it has been developed using Java, an OOP (Object-Oriented Programming) language, and Spring Boot. The frontend was developed by using Angular, Typescript, HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) files, which contains all the interfaces that the user sees. The communication between these two parts takes place through the HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) protocol. All the data are stored in a database based on documents, which is Mongo DB. Two main users are present in IBD Tool: physicians and patients. Through this thesis it has been possible to enrich and improve the platform. One of the first results has been the revision of questionnaires by updating them and inserting new ones. Some features have been added on the side of medical staff. The most innovative feature has been a dashboard which permits to monitor in real time the total number of global and personal patients divided by pathology, the total number of inactive users, the total number of never logged ones, and the total number of patients with a certain pathology in remission or relapse. All these data are included in a in a very organized interface, which makes information easily accessible. Then, following the physicians’ need to carry out a concordance study, it has been created a special section that allows clinicians to download tables in Excel format. In these tables the scores of the questionnaires compiled both by physicians and patients, within the same time span, are associated. Another important section that has been added during this thesis comprehended the new clinical variables previously not present in the application, which now are easily to insert and re-display from the patient dedicated page. IBD Tool is an ever-growing application, and in the future, it may be integrated with any other functionality that makes it more and more avant-garde. The platform is constantly evolving following the requests of physicians. IBD Tool has led to many results in patients monitoring and aroused a lot of interest in clinical practice, being a first step towards a more telemedical future.