Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Taking all these elements into consideration, the practitioner can deal with CGs
executed step-by-step. The system permits to retrieve up-to-date patients' data from
the medical record and track all the activities done over the patient. At that time, the
patient can know exactly where he is (inside of a mid- or long- term treatment) and
devise further possible evolutions of his treatment.
This computerised enactment of CGs brings several economical and medical bene-
fits for practitioners and patients, easing, automating and standardising healthcare
treatments.
The agent-based platform mimics real relationships and roles of real healthcare or-
ganisations, but the management is quite different. The system permits a balance of
the load (avoiding or mitigating waiting lists). Also, healthcare managers can identify
problems in a particular point and implement different policies in a particular medical
resource ( e.g., availability 24/7).
An important feature of medical systems is the knowledge representation. He-
CaSe2 uses different ontologies that separate the knowledge from its use, and permits
to guide the agents' execution with this ontology-based representation.
Another facility promoted with the communication-based execution of CGs is the
inclusion of extra information in these messages. Concretely, the interaction between
practitioners and other services in order to arrange a meeting for this patient uses
patient's preferences to guide the search. There is a change for the traditional delivery
of services in healthcare where the patient has a passive role. In this case, he can take
an active role in the decisions that affect him.
Finally, it is important to note that HeCaSe2 adds security mechanisms to protect
all data exchanged in the system. Although there are different agents that can access
to the EMR, there is a control over the patient's data accesses and all transmissions
are ciphered to assure the privacy and integrity of data.
5 Knowledge Based Home Care eServices for an Ageing Europe
(K4Care)
The K4Care European project ( Knowledge based Home Care eServices for an Ageing
Europe , [8]) is a Specific Targeted Research of Innovation Project funded within the
Sixth Framework Program of the European Commission that brings together 13 aca-
demic and industrial institutions from 7 countries for a period of 3 years starting
March 2006. The main goals of the project are, on the one hand, the definition of a
HC model which may be incorporated as an European standard, integrating the infor-
mation, skills and experiences of specialised Home Care centres and professionals of
several old and new EU countries and, on the other hand, to incorporate it into a pro-
totype HC platform to provide e-services to health professionals, patients and citizens
in general which shows the validity of the model.
While the healthcare information system of a single medical centre is usually rather
centralised, medical assistance in Home Care, which is the scope of K4Care, naturally
needs a distributed service-oriented architecture, as many kinds of actors from differ-
ent institutions are involved ( e.g. , family doctors, physicians, rehabilitation staff,
social workers, patients, etc.). Thus, the K4Care platform , which implements the
proposed generic HC model [8], has been designed in order to meet the needs of
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