In the context of the Citizen Health System (CHS) project, a modular Medical Contact Center (MCC) was developed, which can be used in the monitoring, treatment, and management of chronically ill patients at home, such as diabetic or congestive heart failure patients. The virtue of the CHS contact center is that, using any type of communication and telematics technology, it is able to provide timely and preventive prompting to the patients, thus, achieving better disease management. In this paper, we present the structure of the CHS system, describing the modules that enable its flexible and extensible architecture. It is shown, through specific examples, how quality of healthcare delivery can be increased by using such a system.

No abstract

Diabetes management by insulin administration is based on medical experts' experience, intuition, and expertise. As there is very little information in medical literature concerning practical aspects of this issue, medical experts adopt their own rules for insulin regimen specification and dose adjustment. This paper investigates the application of a neural network approach for the development of a prototype system for knowledge classification in this domain. The system will further facilitate decision making for diabetic patient management by insulin administration. In particular, a generating algorithm for learning arbitrary classification is employed. The factors participating in the decision making were among other diabetes type, patient age, current treatment, glucose profile, physical activity, food intake, and desirable blood glucose control. The resulting system was trained with 100 cases and tested on 100 patient cases. The system proved to be applicable to this particular problem, classifying correctly 92% of the testing cases.

Electronic transfer of healthcare record information between heterogeneous systems raises the need for healthcare information standards. Such standards improve the level of quality that healthcare organizations offer and also control the expenditure on healthcare services provided by these organizations. There are a large number of healthcare related applications that effectively support specific needs but are isolated or incompatible. There is an urgent need to integrate those applications or to interoperate between them, ensuring security concepts. The cost is another crucial aspect that should be considered in the integration of already implemented systems and the design of new systems. This paper aims to give a description of the current developed standards that can be used to provide interoperability in healthcare information systems and to make a short comparison between these standards, including the following: HL7, HL7’s CCOW, CEN/TC251 Healthcare Information System Architecture Standard. This paper also discusses a solution that is being developed in the Citizen Health System (CHS) project to achieve integration of data using a healthcare informatics standard. A test scenario to make some of the project’s modules visually interoperate is also implemented.

No abstract