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Enhanced Patient Management in a Hospital Setting
School of Computing, Telecommunications and Networks Birmingham City University, Birmingham, UK
Abstract A hospital environment must accommodate elective patients and emergency cases; this places great strain on healthcare systems. The management of patients must be at the centre of healthcare systems; to optimise patient management and resource usage the monitoring of patients, staff, and medical facilities forms a central function. Situational-awareness is introduced to provide a basis upon which effective patient monitoring and care pathway optimization may be achieved. Situation awareness requires data capture and processing in intelligent systems; we provide an overview of this with consideration of intelligent context processing and the related context processing algorithm. This paper considers the issues and challenges with the technological developments which may provide a solution to the challenges faced (or at least mitigate the impact of the challenging complex and dynamic hospital environment). Patient monitoring is introduced and the relative merits and de-merits of patient monitoring using RFID technologies are addressed with consideration of Internet based approaches including the Internet-of-Things in Cloud-based solutions. It is postulated that technology enhanced patient management based on situational awareness in intelligent context-aware systems has the capability to improve patient experience along with improvements in resource utilization in a hospital setting. Keywords: situational awareness, hospital settings, enhanced patient monitoring, patient management, resource utilization, technological developments in health informatics, RFID, Internet solutions, cloud-based systems, cloud service models, data processing, intelligent context-aware systems. *Corresponding Author: City Centre Campus, Millennium Point, Curzon Street, Birmingham, B4 7XG, UK, Tel: +44-(0)121-331-5000, Email: ptmbcu@gmail.com IT Convergence Practice (INPRA), Vol. 1, No. 3, pp. 1-21, September 2013 [pdf] |