Prototyping context-aware nursing support mobile system.

A context aware nursing support system to push right information to the right person at the right moment is the key to increase clinical safety under a computerized hospital. We prototyped a system which obtains context from positions of nurses and list of expected clinical procedures. A WoZ test showed that the proposed approach has potential to decrease incidents caused by information delivery error.

Embedded ubiquitous services on hospital information systems.

A Hospital Information Systems (HIS) have turned a hospital into a gigantic computer with huge computational power, huge storage and wired/wireless local area network. On the other hand, a modern medical device, such as echograph, is a computer system with several functional units connected by an internal network named a bus. Therefore, we can embed such a medical device into the HIS by simply replacing the bus with the local area network. This paper designed and developed two embedded systems, a ubiquitous echograph system and a networked digital camera. Evaluations of the developed systems clearly show that the proposed approach, embedding existing clinical systems into HIS, drastically changes productivity in the clinical field. Once a clinical system becomes a pluggable unit for a gigantic computer system, HIS, the combination of multiple embedded systems with application software designed under deep consideration about clinical processes may lead to the emergence of disruptive innovation in the clinical field.

Clinical path modeling in XML for a web-based benchmark test system for medication.

Many hospitals have introduced the Clinical Path (Path) to improve medical procedures. A Path is a way to manage care and check lists for a certain disease, providing a useful tool for hospital management. Paths can help hospitals reduce the duration of hospitalization and variations in care of patients while increasing hospital revenue. Nowadays, Paths are made by each hospital and there is no standard format. Benchmark testing between Paths used by different hospitals is important for evaluating medical practices, in order to develop and improve more effective practices. However, as the formats used in Paths are not standardized, benchmark testing of Paths is no easy task. To start benchmark testing of Paths, we compare medication in Paths and introduce description rules of medication in XML. Based on these, we developed a prototype system that enables us to compare the difference of medications in Paths prescribed between multiple of hospitals.

Electronic clinical path system based on semistructured data model using personal digital assistant for onsite access.

Clinical Paths (Paths) have been introduced by different hospitals for patient care management. An Electronic Clinical Path (ECP) with onsite access provision seems to improve the efficiency of medical staffs because they can share vast medical information about patients at a time and also can reuse accumulated data easily, which is impossible with paper-based Path. Data model is the basis for implementing ECP. However, there is no established model for ECP. The purpose of this study is to introduce a model for ECP and implement an ECP with onsite access system. We introduced a Semistructured Data Model (SSDM) for ECP, and implemented a Web application system based on this model using Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) as inputting device. Our system functioned as expected with wireless LAN, and users handled the data on bedside using PDA. By introducing SSDM, we showed the correspondence between schema of Paths and implementation of ECP.