A feasibility study for the provision of electronic healthcare tools and services in areas of Greece, Cyprus and Italy

Background: Through this paper, we present the initial steps for the creation of an integrated platform for the provision of a series of eHealth tools and services to both citizens and travelers in isolated areas of thesoutheast Mediterranean, and on board ships travelling across it. The platform was created through an INTERREG IIIB ARCHIMED project called INTERMED. Methods: The support of primary healthcare, home care and the continuous education of physicians are the three major issues that the proposed platform is trying to facilitate. The proposed system is based on state-of-the-art telemedicine systems and is able to provide the following healthcare services: i) Telecollaboration and teleconsultation services between remotely located healthcare providers, ii) telemedicine services in emergencies, iii) home telecare services for "at risk" citizens such as the elderly and patients with chronic diseases, and iv) eLearning services for the continuous training through seminars of both healthcare personnel (physicians, nurses etc) and persons supporting "at risk" citizens. These systems support data transmission over simple phone lines, internet connections, integrated services digital network/digital subscriber lines, satellite links, mobile networks (GPRS/3G), and wireless local area networks. The data corresponds, among others, to voice, vital biosignals, still medical images, video, and data used by eLearning applications. The proposed platform comprises several systems, each supporting different services. These were integrated using a common data storage and exchange scheme in order to achieve system interoperability in terms of software, language and national characteristics. Results: The platform has been installed and evaluated in different rural and urban sites in Greece, Cyprus and Italy. The evaluation was mainly related to technical issues and user satisfaction. The selected sites are, among others, rural health centers, ambulances, homes of "at-risk" citizens, and a ferry. Conclusions: The results proved the functionality and utilization of the platform in various rural places in Greece, Cyprus and Italy. However, further actions are needed to enable the local healthcare systems and the different population groups to be familiarized with, and use in their everyday lives, mature technological solutions for the provision of healthcare services

Marshfield Clinic: Health Information Technology Paves the Way for Population Health Management

Highlights Fund-defined attributes of an ideal care delivery system and best practices, including an internal electronic health record, primary care teams, physician quality metrics and mentors, and standardized care processes for chronic care management

Alcuni abstract di articoli che trattano argomenti relativi all'eHealth

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Considerations of Telemedicine in the Delivery of Modern Healthcare

Telecommunication technologies have made telemedicine a modern health delivery system. Telemedicine enhances home telehealth services as specialty care, patient consultations, remote patient monitoring, and medical education without the patients having to leave their homes. Urban medical centers have used telemedicine to expand access to specialist services by centralizing health care providers to assist patients seen by their primary care providers. This paper provides a brief history of telemedicine; explains how telemedicine works; covers a few cases of telemedicine implementation, identifies lessons learned, discusses some current issues of telemedicine, and concludes with some limitations of telemedicine

Smart home technology for aging

The majority of the growing population, in the US and the rest of the world requires some degree of formal and or informal care either due to the loss of function or failing health as a result of aging and most of them suffer from chronic disorders. The cost and burden of caring for elders is steadily increasing. This thesis focuses on providing the analysis of the technologies with which a Smart Home is built to improve the quality of life of the elderly. A great deal of emphasis is given to the sensor technologies that are the back bone of these Smart Homes. In addition to the Analysis of these technologies a survey of commercial sensor products and products in research that are concerned with monitoring the health of the occupants of the Smart Home is presented. A brief analysis on the communication technologies which form the communication infrastructure for the Smart Home is also illustrated. Finally, System Architecture for the Smart Home is proposed describing the functionality and users of the system. The feasibility of the system is also discussed. A scenario measuring the blood glucose level of the occupant in a Smart Home is presented as to support the system architecture presented

Achieving Efficiency: Lessons From Four Top-Performing Hospitals

Synthesizes lessons from case studies of how four hospitals achieved greater efficiency, including pursuing quality and access, customizing technology, emphasizing communications, standardizing processes, and integrating care, systems, and providers

Technologie en innovatie in Vlaanderen: Prioriteiten.

Vlaanderen;

AN ATTEMPT TO DEFINE CONTEXT AWARENESS IN MOBILE E-HEALTH ENVIRONMENTS

Nurses, doctors, physiotherapists, psychologists and other professionals or specialists come together to provide care to home residing patients, making continuous assessment, diagnosis and treatment possible beyond the walls of hospitals. Such teams of professionals are focused on each individual patient, and are virtual, i.e. they make decisions without being together physically, dynamically, i.e. professionals come and go as needed, and collaborate, as they combine their knowledge to provide effective care. Our system, coined DITIS, is a web based system that enables the effective management and collaboration of virtual healthcare teams and accessing medical information in a secure manner from a variety of mobile devices from anytime and anyplace, adapting the information according to various parameters like, user role, access right, device capabilities and wireless medium. This paper introduces the DITIS system, and identifies the needs and challenges of co-ordinated teams of multidisciplinary healthcare professionals (HCPs) functioning in a context awareness environment under the wireless environment. Pilo

Ambient-aware continuous care through semantic context dissemination

Background: The ultimate ambient-intelligent care room contains numerous sensors and devices to monitor the patient, sense and adjust the environment and support the staff. This sensor-based approach results in a large amount of data, which can be processed by current and future applications, e. g., task management and alerting systems. Today, nurses are responsible for coordinating all these applications and supplied information, which reduces the added value and slows down the adoption rate. The aim of the presented research is the design of a pervasive and scalable framework that is able to optimize continuous care processes by intelligently reasoning on the large amount of heterogeneous care data. Methods: The developed Ontology-based Care Platform (OCarePlatform) consists of modular components that perform a specific reasoning task. Consequently, they can easily be replicated and distributed. Complex reasoning is achieved by combining the results of different components. To ensure that the components only receive information, which is of interest to them at that time, they are able to dynamically generate and register filter rules with a Semantic Communication Bus (SCB). This SCB semantically filters all the heterogeneous care data according to the registered rules by using a continuous care ontology. The SCB can be distributed and a cache can be employed to ensure scalability. Results: A prototype implementation is presented consisting of a new-generation nurse call system supported by a localization and a home automation component. The amount of data that is filtered and the performance of the SCB are evaluated by testing the prototype in a living lab. The delay introduced by processing the filter rules is negligible when 10 or fewer rules are registered. Conclusions: The OCarePlatform allows disseminating relevant care data for the different applications and additionally supports composing complex applications from a set of smaller independent components. This way, the platform significantly reduces the amount of information that needs to be processed by the nurses. The delay resulting from processing the filter rules is linear in the amount of rules. Distributed deployment of the SCB and using a cache allows further improvement of these performance results