A smartphone-based system for the automated management of point-of-care test results in hospitals.

OBJECTIVE Managing test results is an important issue in hospitals because of the increasing use of point-of-care testing (POCT). Here, we propose a smartphone-based system for automatically managing POCT test results. MATERIALS AND METHODS We developed the system to provide convenience to the medical staffs. The system recognizes the patient identification or prescription number of the test by reading barcodes and provides a countdown to indicate when the results will be ready. When the countdown in finished, a picture of the test result is transferred to the electronic medical record server using the Health Level 7 protocol. Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) kits were selected in this research because HIV is a life-threatening infectious virus, especially for the medical staff who treat undiagnosed patients. The performance of the system was verified from a survey of the users. RESULTS The performance of the system was tested at the emergency room (ER) for 10 months using commercially available POCT kits for detecting HIV. The survey showed that, in total, 80% and 0% of users reported positive or negative feedback, respectively. The staff also reported that the system reduced total processing time by approximately 32 min, in addition to reducing workload. CONCLUSIONS The developed automated management system was successfully tested at an ER for 10 months. The survey results show that the system is effective and that medical staff members who used the system are satisfied with using the system at the ER.