User perspective of DITIS: Virtual collaborative teams for home-healthcare

Abstract

DITIS supports home-care by offering wireless health care services for chronic illnesses. The main service is the dynamic creation, management and co-ordination of virtual collaborative healthcare teams for the continuous treatment of the patient at home, independently of the physical location of the team's members (or the patient). For each patient a flexible (dynamic) virtual medical team is provided, made up from visiting home-care nurses, doctors, and other health care professionals, responsible for each case. This virtual team is able to provide dedicated, personalized and private service to the home residing patient on a need based and timely fashion, under the direction of the treating specialist, without the necessity to move the patient from his home, thus making better use of the scarce and expensive medical professionals and scarce hospital beds, irrespective of geographic or organisational barriers. DITIS uses a number of state of the art technologies which are seamlessly put together, such as collaboration and personalization via mobile agents, access to medical data from anywhere and any time via a variety of mobile devices and a variety of protocols (i.e., WAP, HTML) and continuous connectivity via new communication technologies such as ADSL and GPRS, and soon UMTS. All the technologies are selected for platform independence.