ORCONERA: A use case of an integration of a Home Hospitalisation Unit management platform with legacy systems

Home hospitalisation units are one of the key pillars for a sustainable high quality health model based on a patient centred approach, mainly for chronic disease management. This paper presents ORCONERA, a Home Hospitalisation Unit (HHU) management platform, its integration with legacy systems and the lessons learnt during the full process. A consultancy work was carried out in an early stage in order to define and develop the map of internal processes of the unit, which should help to redefine and optimise a methodology for the HHU daily work. In addition to technological issues, special attention has been paid to integration matters, evaluation, training, and maintenance activities. Authors emphasize that the key issues for the success in the deployment of this type of e-health platforms are not technological, but social and structural. Therefore, involvement of medical and administrative staff in early stages of any e-health project is highly recommended to guarantee the matching between user needs and platform functionalities and the integration with legacy systems. ORCONERA is being used to attend the patients by medical and administrative staff from Hospital Universitario Marques de Valdecilla – Santander since January 2008.