Supporting technically the Continuity of Medical Care: Status report and perspectives

The purpose of this paper is to present the status of the R&D efforts of our Laboratory concerning the development and the improvement of hardware and software means, appropriately designed to ensure Continuity of Medical Care among Primary Health-care Agencies, Hospitals and Home Care, according to existing or emerging National, European and International regulations and standards. Our R&D is presently focused on the development of an integrated prototype system, including first, improved equipment facilitating the Continuity of Care, second, software supporting Medical Decision Making during emergency-care delivery, as well as, real and virtual audio-visual monitoring of chronic and terminally ill patients at home-alike conditions, third, a Continuity of Care Record (CCR), complying with the major ANSI E2369-05 CCR, ISO 13606-1:2008 and prEN 13940 Standards, and finally, linking the CCR to appropriate semantically annotated Web-Services, providing for enhanced technical interoperability and medical clarity and simplicity.