An online-processing critical patient monitoring system- an interoperability overview

With the increasing expansion of Healthcare Information Systems, platforms for interoperability and monitoring systems have become vital tools to support the clinical practice. Under this scenario, the creation of knowledge in real-time to feed decision support tools is essential. INTCare is one the solutions that adapts the way that information is gathered and processed in order to obtain that knowledge. Once new information arrives, it triggers the ETL (extract, transform, load) procces enabling real-time processes like data mining. However, the system fails in recognize if a patient is absent from bed or not. This problem led to the development of the Patient Localization and Management System (PaLMS), a Radio-Frequency IDentification (RFID) serving as localization and monitoring system. This paper describes the PaLMS implementation as well as an intelligent MultiAgent System for the integration of PaLMS into the hospital platform for interoperability named AIDA (Agency for Integration, Diffusion and Archive of Medical Information). At the end, an usability evaluation was performed in order to assess the level of usability of the existing systems at Centro Hospitalar do Porto, such as the PaLMS, the INTCare and the AIDA platform. In terms of usability, the system got very positive evalutions, despite the fact some medical staff argued that they lose too much time elaborating the records.