Open source is a still unexploited chance for healthcare organizations and technology providers to answer to a growing demand for innovation and to join economical benefits with a new way of managing hospital information systems. This chapter will present the case of the web enterprise clinical portal developed in Italy by Niguarda Hospital in Milan with the support of Fondazione Politecnico di Milano, to enable a paperless environment for clinical and administrative activities in the ward. This represents also one rare case of open source technology and reuse in the healthcare sector, as the system's porting is now taking place at Besta Neurological Institute in Milan. This institute is customizing the portal to feed researchers with structured clinical data collected in its portal's patient records, so that they can be analyzed, e.g., through business intelligence tools. Both organizational and clinical advantages are investigated, from process monitoring, to semantic data structuring, to recognition of common patterns in care processes.
Traceability and quality assurance of bedside processes are often still manual, without the appropriate support of information systems. Automatic Identification and Data Capture (AIDC) solutions integrated with Mobile&Wireless devices are key solutions to meet the needs of secure identification of persons and items and of traceability of processes in healthcare organizations. These technologies can fit a variety of processes, like enterprise-wide person/item identification, blood transfusions, surgical samples identification, therapy management. The challenge is to extend the use of these solutions also to other processes like biobanking, where stem cellular products require strict procedures of collection and manipulation, even in critical environmental conditions. Fondazione IRCCS Istituto Nazionale dei Tumori in Milan (Italy) has a wide experience in RFId projects and is starting to lead a project aimed to design, develop and implement a set of organizational models, acknowledged procedures and ICT tools in order to improve actual support to collection and transplantation of Human Stem Cells. In this paper we present a literature overview of cases of implementation of AIDC technology solution and of how its character of ubiquity and versatility could fit well with process requirements, discussing the Istituto's business case.
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