What is the K4CARE vision?
In eHealth it is increasingly necessary to develop tele-informatic applications to support people involved in providing basic medical care (physicians, nurses, patients, relatives, and citizens in general).
The care of chronic and disabled patients involves life long treatment under continuous expert supervision. Moreover, healthcare workers and patients accept that being cared for in hospitals or residential facilities may be unnecessary and even counterproductive.
From a global view, such patients may saturate national health services and increase health related costs. The debate over the crisis of financing healthcare is open and is a basic political issue for old and new EU member countries and could hinder European convergence.
To face these challenges we can differentiate medical assistance in health centres from assistance in a ubiquitous way (Home Care -HC- model); the latter can undoubtedly benefit from the introduction of ICT. This project will develop a platform to manage the information needed to guarantee an ICT Home Care service.
K4CARE will:
integrate information of different types and from different sources | |
be integrated with ICT whilst ensuring private and customized data access | |
use ontologies to define the profile of accessing subjects (e.g. physicians, patient) and objects (e.g. disease, case study) | |
have a mechanism to combine and refine the ontologies to personalize the system, taking into account the | |
incorporate 'know-how' from geriatric clinical guidelines as Intervention Plans (IP) | |
generate IPs from the healthcare centres databases if clinical guidelines do not exist or are inappropriate for a particular situation | |
configure a knowledge-based decision support tool that can supply eServices to all subjects involved in the Home Care model | |
extract evidence from real patients and integrate it with published evidence derived from RCTs |
