Incorporating wireless technology into virtual organizations supporting the work of healthcare teams

This study investigates how a virtual organization can be built in a distributed computing environment which includes wireless technology to support the work of a multi-disciplinary healthcare team collaborating to provide patient care in the cancer domain. It focuses on identifying the functionality required at the wireless device interface to provide the information from distributed resources needed by different members of the healthcare team to fulfil their role in a patient's care at the point of care. It presents the concept of virtual organization in a clinical environment supporting multi-disciplinary care teams whose members are collaborating to treat a patient more effectively by providing and storing relevant data from a variety of medical records/data resources available in a distributed computing environment to the virtual organization. An analysis of the healthcare teams at the Velindre Cancer Hospital, NHS Trust has identified the functionality and information required by different members of the care team at the point of care. This information will be used in the next stage of the project to inform the creation of a prototype virtual organization which will be used to evaluate this approach to supporting the work of healthcare teams. The paper concentrates on the role of wireless devices in the virtual organization particularly their use at the point of care.