Integrated Care Plan and Documentation on Handheld Devices in Mobile Home Care

Mobile work situations within home care of the elderly require immediate and ubiquitous access to patient-oriented data. We have developed a PDA based prototype that provides both access to the current care plan and an intuitive way for home help personnel to document the performed measures during mobile work. System development was conducted according to a user centered design approach in interdisciplinary working groups consisting of home help personnel, nurses, physicians, medical informaticians, system developers and usability experts. In this paper, we describe how the development of the prototype was performed and present our design considerations as well as the resulting prototype.