Improving Healthcare Team Collaboration in Hospital Transfers through Cloud-Based Mobile Systems

Abstract

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.

Hybrid Cloud for Healthcare Data Sharingand Mobile Access: An ArchitecturalOverview

“…The strategy of the framework they proposed was to continue to receive and redirect virtual workloads to other geographic areas for processing even when deployment anomalies are detected. The afore-going proposed solutions are however not ideal for data-intensive applications in geographic locations where bandwidth costs are relatively high, such in sub-Saharan Africa [12]. Again, software and networking solutions have been put forth by cloud computing providers to improve the overall performance and manageability of the hybrid cloud, particularly to seamlessly bridge on-premise data centres with the public cloud infrastructure.…”

“…One industry that stands to benefit from extending mobile computing with cloud infrastructure is the healthcare industry [11] where clinicians need the ability to access healthcare data from different locations and across multiple devices [12]. Mobile cloud is one way by which mobile devices could be used to access and process electronic health records of patients, to view diagnostic images in various resolutions or collect health data from patients [13].…”

“…With the promising potential of cloud computing in developing economies, studies [16][17][18][19] have been done to help shape cloud adoption but the appropriateness of a hybrid cloud architecture to meet specific business requirements have received little attention. In the healthcare industry, specific network requirements of availability [12,20,21], economic archive storage capacity [20,22], mobile device accessibility [12,13], regulatory compliance [20,23] and security [24] demand particular characteristics [25] in the hybrid cloud. From the aforementioned trends, a hybrid cloud computing architecture that places the mobile device or thin clients first is the logical choice especially in regions with low fixed broadband but high mobile penetration rates.…”