Benefits of Provenance in Home Care

Electronic information processing is more and more common in healthcare applications and involves the handling of patient healthcare records, medical procedures and decisions. The distributed and heterogeneous nature of healthcare institutions results in disconnected information islands which hinder the treatment of patients. Better and user centred healthcare services require that the information islands are connected and medical professionals are able to view the treatment process as a whole. Healthcare record exchange standards help pulling together the data. The concepts of provenance and process documentation help to analyse the way results are produced. Given the technologies of patient record exchange and process documentation, we are investigating how these technologies can help to improve healthcare services provided in the home care environment of the K4Care EU project. We present the service oriented informatics environment of the K4Care platform and show that making this system provenance aware enables medical professionals to easily find the reasons why certain procedures were followed in a treatment and find out how the procedures can be improved.