Tele-homecare supported by the DITIS collaborative platform

Abstract

Nurses, doctors, physiotherapists, social workers, psychologists and others come together to provide care to home residing patients including elderly people, making continuous assessment, diagnosis and treatment possible beyond the walls of
hospitals and specialist treatment centers. 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. DITIS is a web based system that supports this model. It enables the effective management and collaboration of virtual healthcare teams, and provides secure access to medical information from anyplace and anytime via desktop computers (at work) or a variety of mobile devices from anytime and any place. It includes a set of tools for effective scheduling and coordination of team members, with features including automatic notification and alerting. It makes use of supportive tools relevant to home care that improve efficiency and minimises errors of home care monitoring. The paper introduces the DITIS system, and identifies the needs and challenges of co-ordinated teams of multidisciplinary healthcare professionals. Then the adopted technology is briefly described. Pilot implementations of the systems as well as an evaluation study of the system are also briefly presented.