“... represents a scaleable, extensible personalised healthcare information
system driven directly from national policy on disease early detection and prevention”
The Healthcare@Home information system research has been expressly focused on a purpose of ‘near real time’ ethical risk analysis for disease early detection and prevention. To fulfil this system purpose, achieving universal technical interoperability between sensors, patient path hubs, messaging, storage and retrieval sub-systems is a vital step and only the first part of the solution. Complex health service applications place additional fastidious requirements on the design of information services, particularly in terms of integration to clinical practice, healthcare policies and standardised definitions of data.
During the 2½ year research period of the project, we have realised several significant milestones. Healthcare@Home includes support for
at-home, in-clinic and mobile wireless sensor devices feeding patient-proximal data
hubs, timeline-based physiological trend analysis, data aggregation/dashboarding and
individualised risk stratification. These and other decision support tools are embedded
in portal designs supporting ‘end-to-end’ workflows focused by the composite
needs of a National Service Framework (NSF) for patients with diabetes. Healthcare@Home thus represents a scaleable, extensible personalised healthcare information
system driven directly from national policy on disease early detection and prevention.
The sub-menu items at the top of this page will take you to more detailed descriptions of each of the major areas of results from the project. Our publications page will take you to our repository of published papers and Powerpoint presentations. There you can find in-depth explanations of the technical approach we have taken.
In conjunction with representative clinical staff, we have undertaken an evaluation of the system for acceptability and usability. Feedback from this evaluation indicates that:
The remote patient monitoring approach integrated into the clinical care regime is particularly useful;
The data representation in a graphical format is easy to interpret and provides an intuitive way to understand the data;
The care pathways specifications are adequately and suitably translated in the portal environment thus ensuring familiarity and ease of transition for clinical staff;
The various pathway tasks are easy to complete;
The innovative and novel concept of patient ranking is of great interest.
