Designing process-driven information systems in nursing careMaster's Thesis from the year 2005 in the subject Computer Science - Commercial Information Technology, grade: A, European University Viadrina Frankfurt (Oder) (Virtual Global University), 73 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: Nursing care for seniors is going through a time of upheaval. On the one hand side, the number of people in need of care will increase significantly due to changes in age structures and demographic development. On the other hand, care services are facing increased demand for quality assurance and a trend towards evidence-based nursing applying scientific findings. There is a focus on the costs of healthcare services today and the projected developments. Official regulations are changed and improved; however, long-term financing is still not solved because of the anticipated developments. Hence, there is a strive towards providing high-quality healthcare services that can be paid for in the future. While this requires process-optimizations on the one hand, additional improvements will be necessary that can be addressed with information technology. To date, experience with nursing information systems has shown limited success in practical deployment. Reasons for this situation are the specific challenges of nursing care in combination with failures to meet requirements in this field with suitable system development. This paper analyzes design approaches followed so far and suggests a process-oriented architecture aimed to overcome deficiencies of today’s systems. Two perspectives are combined to form a workflow system that comprises the general stages of the nursing process along with individual nursing pathways. The combination of these horizontal and vertical views addresses requirements holistically and overcomes the limits of designs focusing on either one view only. Nursing rules engines are integrated in the architecture to validate data entry and identify items to review, such as vital signs beyond a predefined range. The thesis concludes with two examples that demonstrate how the proposed architecture can be applied in practice, explaining why this concept is different from applications known to date. |
