A software architecture and data model for community-based healthcare environments

Abstract

Major changes in healthcare delivery are needed to ease the pressures caused by global increase in ageing population and prevalence of chronic diseases. Recent care initiatives address these problems by delivering care in community-based settings, away from hospitals. The community care model requires that a patient’s health condition is also monitored in the home environment to allow assessment and follow-up of the health status. Our work presented in this paper aims to design a system architecture and data model that would provide efficient means to perform essential information management for ambulatory monitoring in a home health care setting. We describe a general purpose architecture and data model that is designed for collecting ambulatory data from various existing devices and systems, as well as for analyzing, storing and presenting clinically significant information to the care personnel.