| full paper |
Abstract:
Healthcare is an industry with a diverse set of stakeholders: governments, private healthcare providers, medical practitioners (physicians, nurses, researchers, etc.), home healthcare providers and workers, and last but not least, clients/patients and their families. Overlapping and interacting environments include hospitals, clinics, long term care facilities, primary care providers, homes, etc., involving acute, emergency, chronic, primary, and outpatient care. Patient transitions between these environments are often unnecessarily difficult due to an inability by providers to access pre-existing patient records. Mobile/wireless solutions can play an important role in supporting healthcare by providing applications that access healthcare records and reduce paperwork for clinical physicians, nurses, and other workers, community healthcare practitioners and their patients, or mobile chronically ill patients such as diabetics. This paper makes the case for mobile healthcare and its solutions in the non-acute community healthcare environment, where critical issues include usability, adoption, interoperability, change management, risk mitigation, security and privacy, and return on investment. A proposed community healthcare application demonstrates how these issues are addressed. |
