A medical diagnostic and treatment advice system for the provision of home care

Healthcare is an increasingly collaborative enterprise, involving broad range of healthcare services provided by many individuals and organizations. Apart from the provision of healthcare services to patients during hospitalization, the ability to assist people who have healthcare needs at their homes (e.g. the elderly) has become an increasingly critical issue. Home care may involve, among others, provision of medical advice as well as detection and handling of critical situations. Provision of such personalized medical care services to patients requires readily access to integrated healthcare services ubiquitously. Although Grid technology can support the integration of healthcare services across settings of care and among providers of care, it doesn't make it available at the point of care (i.e. at a patient's home) which is often an environment with poor network and IT infrastructure. The integration of mobile and wireless devices with Grid technology can provide ubiquitous and pervasive access to Grid services. This paper presents MASPortal, a Grid portal application for the assistance of people who are in need of home care. MASPortal is designed for use with wireless Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) and provides remote access to an automated medical diagnostic and treatment advice system via an adaptive and easy to use interface. In particular, it facilitates collection of information from several sources in order to compose the context of the patient needing assistance. Given this context and a medical knowledge base, the patient's medical condition is assessed and medical advice is provided or in the case of an emergency the relevant healthcare processes are triggered. MASPortal has been implemented with a multi-layered security infrastructure in order to ensure secure access to healthcare processes and sensitive patient data.