The Extent and Coverage of Current Knowledge of Connected Health: Systematic Mapping Study

Background: This paper examines the development of the Connected Health research landscape with a view on providing a historical perspective on existing Connected Health research. Connected Health has become a rapidly growing research field as our healthcare system is facing pressured to become more proactive and patient centred. Objective: We aimed to identify the extent and coverage of the current body of knowledge in Connected Health. With this, we want to identify which topics have drawn the attention of Connected health researchers, and if there are gaps or interdisciplinary opportunities for further research. Methods: We used a systematic mapping study that combines scientific contributions from research on medicine, business, computer science and engineering. We analyse the papers with seven classification criteria, publication source, publication year, research types, empirical types, contribution types research topic and the condition studied in the paper. Results: Altogether, our search resulted in 208 papers which were analysed by a multidisciplinary group of researchers. Our results indicate a slow start for Connected Health research but a more recent steady upswing since 2013. The majority of papers proposed healthcare solutions (37%) or evaluated Connected Health approaches (23%). Case studies (28%) and experiments (26%) were the most popular forms of scientific validation employed. Diabetes, cancer, multiple sclerosis, and heart conditions are among the most prevalent conditions studied. Conclusions: We conclude that Connected Health research seems to be an established field of research, which has been growing strongly during the last five years. There seems to be more focus on technology driven research with a strong contribution from medicine, but business aspects of Connected health are not as much studied

Modelling care pathways in a connected health setting

Connected Health involves the use of ICT to improve healthcare quality and outcomes. In a connected heath environment, stakeholders can struggle to make best use of this information coming from a variety of sources. Given this, we are investigating the challenge of how to use available infor-mation to make informed decisions about the care pathway which the patient should follow to ensure that prevention and treatment services are efficient and effective. In this paper, we outline our research into care pathway and infor-mation modelling in a Connected Health setting. The research is currently un-derway, and follows a series of stages using sources in industry and academia. In this paper, we present an overview of the project work packages including an explanation on how the different stages of the research form a continuum in which the developed models will be continually adjusted. We describe how empirical evidence will be used in the development of the models through fol-lowing an evolutionary multi-method research approach