Chronic respiratory diseases are one of the most prevalent health problems in the world. Treatment for these kind of afflictions often take place at home, where the continuous care of a medical specialist is frequently beyond the economical means of the patient, therefore having to rely on informal caregivers (family, friends, etc.). Unfortunately, these treatments require a deep involvement on their part, which results in a heavy burden on the caregivers' routine and usually end up deteriorating their quality of life. In recent years, mHealth and eHealth applications have gained a wide interest in academia due to new capabilities enabled by the latest advancements in mobile technologies and wireless communication infrastructure. These innovations have resulted in several applications that have successfully managed to improve automatic patient monitoring and treatment and to bridge the distance between patients, caregivers and medical specialists. We therefore seek to move this trend forward by now pushing these capabilities into the field of respiratory therapies in order to assist patients with chronic respiratory diseases with their treatment, and to improve both their own and their caregivers' quality of life. This paper presents a cloud-based mobile system to support and improve homecare for respiratory diseases. The platform described uses vital signs monitoring as a way of sharing data between hospitals, caregivers and patients. Using an iterative research approach and the user's direct feedback, we show how mobile technologies can improve a respiratory therapy and a family's quality of life.
It is a clinical fact that better patient flow management in and between hospitals improves quality of care, resource utilization, and cost efficiency. As the number of patients in hospitals constantly grows, the need for hospital transfers is directly affected. Interhospital transfers can be required for several reasons but they are most commonly made when the diagnostic and therapeutic facilities required for a patient are not available locally. Transferring a critical patient between hospitals is commonly associated with risk of death and complications. This raises the question: How can we improve healthcare team collaboration in hospital transfers through the use of emerging information technology and communication services? This paper presents a cloud-based mobile system for supporting team collaboration and decision-making in the transportation of patients in critical condition. The Rapid Emergency Medicine Score (REMS) scale was used as an outcome variable, being a useful scale to assess the risk profile of critical patients requiring transfers between hospitals. This helps medical staff to adopt proper risk-prevention measures when handling a transfer and to react on time if any complications arise in transit.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.