Impact of Mobile and Wireless Technology on Healthcare Delivery services

Modern healthcare delivery services embrace the use of leading edge technologies and new scientific discoveries to enable better cures for diseases and better means to enable early detection of most life-threatening diseases. The healthcare industry is finding itself in a state of turbulence and flux. The major innovations lie with the use of information technologies and particularly, the adoption of mobile and wireless applications in healthcare delivery [1]. Wireless devices are becoming increasingly popular across the healthcare field, enabling caregivers to review patient records and test results, enter diagnosis information during patient visits and consult drug formularies, all without the need for a wired network connection [2]. A pioneering medical-grade, wireless infrastructure supports complete mobility throughout the full continuum of healthcare delivery. It facilitates the accurate collection and the immediate dissemination of patient information to physicians and other healthcare care professionals at the time of clinical decision-making, thereby ensuring timely, safe, and effective patient care. This paper investigates the wireless technologies that can be used for medical applications, and the effectiveness of such wireless solutions in a healthcare environment. It discusses challenges encountered; and concludes by providing recommendations on policies and standards for the use of such technologies within hospitals

Implementing Operations Support Systems in E-Health Based Systems

Information and communication technologies have been introduced in different dimensions of the health care. e-Health is the use of advanced communications technologies such as the Internet, portable, wireless and other sophisticated devices to support health care delivery and education. It has the potentials of improving the efficiency of health care delivery globally. With the increasing demand for information at the point of care, health care providers could explore the advances provided by mobile technologies and the increasing capabilities, compactness and pervasiveness of computing devices to adopt operations supports systems (OSS) in e-Health based systems in order to provide efficient services and enhance their performances. In this paper, we present, the development and implementation of operations supports in e- Health based systems. The system promises to deliver greater productivity for health care practitioner

Formal modelling and design of mobile prescription applications

Adverse drug effects are a major cause of death in the world with tens of thousand deaths occurring each year because of medication or prescription errors. Many errors involve the prescription or administration of the wrong drug or dosage by care givers to patients due to illegible handwriting, dosage mistakes, confusing drug names. With the use of mobile devices such as personal digital assistants and smart phones some of these errors could be eliminated because they allow prescription information to be captured and viewed in type rather than handwriting. This paper presents a formal modelling, and design of a prescription application to improve health care services. This could lead to costs and life savings in healthcare centres across the world especially in developing countries where treatment processes are usually paper based

Integrating Antenatal and Postnatal Pregnancy Services to Hospital Management System

Antenatal and postnatal processes and services is a component of Hospital Management Systems that has been given very little attention. Most healthcare institution carries out the antenatal and postnatal processes manually and keeps records of the whole processes on paper. In most cases in most hospital, records kept on paper and files get missing or misplaced leading to the loss of important records of clients which would have been very helpful for future pregnancies and clinical diagnosis. Report generation and statistical figures are difficult to generate with the manual based system. Data errors, security, and privacy are another problems associated with the manual system. In this paper, the antenatal and postnatal services were incorporated into the Hospital Management System of Usmanu Danfodiyo University, Sokoto with a view to reducing the issues and inconsistencies encountered with the manual procedure. Dreamweaver, PHP, CSS, JavaScript, Ajax, HTML and MySQL are the technological tools used to automate the incorporated antenatal and postnatal services in the system. The usefulness of the proposed system was evaluated using the System Usability Scale (SUS) questionnaire and some clinical users. The experimental evaluation shows that the developed system is beneficial to the clinic and the general public based on the result obtained in this study. The results also demonstrated that the developed system can fit into the antenatal and postnatal routine of many hospitals with little or no modification

Exploring the Design of Pay-Per-Use Objects in the Construction Domain

Equipment used in the construction domain is often hired in order to reduce cost and maintenance overhead. The cost of hire is dependent on the time period involved and does not take into account the actual use equipment has received. This paper presents our initial investigation into how physical objects augmented with sensing and communication technologies can measure use in order to enable new pay-per-use payment models for equipment hire. We also explore user interaction with pay-per-use objects via mobile devices. The user interactions that take place within our prototype scenario range from simple information access to transactions involving multiple users. This paper presents the design, implementation and evaluation of a prototype pay-per-use system motivated by a real world equipment hire scenario. We also provide insights into the various challenges introduced by supporting a pay-per-use model, including data storage and data security in addition to user interaction issues

Designing an architecture for secure sharing of personal health records : a case of developing countries

Includes bibliographical references.While there has been an increase in the design and development of Personal Health Record (PHR) systems in the developed world, little has been done to explore the utility of these systems in the developing world. Despite the usual problems of poor infrastructure, PHR systems designed for the developing world need to conform to users with different models of security and literacy than those designed for developed world. This study investigated a PHR system distributed across mobile devices with a security model and an interface that supports the usage and concerns of low literacy users in developing countries. The main question addressed in this study is: “Can personal health records be stored securely and usefully on mobile phones?” In this study, mobile phones were integrated into the PHR architecture that we/I designed because the literature reveals that the majority of the population in developing countries possess mobile phones. Additionally, mobile phones are very flexible and cost efficient devices that offer adequate storage and computing capabilities to users for typically communication operations. However, it is also worth noting that, mobile phones generally do not provide sufficient security mechanisms to protect the user data from unauthorized access