Ward Informative System: hospital application of telemedicine

The increasing diffusion of computer technology and telecommunications has made the telemedicine approach, providing medical information and services at a distance, a fundamental tool to harmonise quality and cost in the health system. While the most common use of telemedicine has been, up to now, in the long distance links between the patient and the physician, the object of this work is a hospital application, in which both the technological and the management aspects have been faced. Information technology allows the acceleration of the accomplishment of the information processes, offering easy and quick procedures to record, archive, process and search the desired data. The ward represents a complex organisation that requires the control of different kinds of data for the management of the personnel, of the patients, of the clinical information. Only an effective management is able to guarantee a coordinate and integrated activity of the different parts of the system: the more complex the organisation, the more effective has to be the informative system. Moreover, from the management point of view, only the availability of correct information about the work loads in the different units of the hospital makes possible an effective distribution of the human resources. All these targets may be achieved by introducing an Informative System. The developed Ward Informative System is composed of two main components: the hardware surveillance system, placed at the patient bed side, and a central control station. The hardware surveillance system at the bed site comprises a palm-top data logger based on an Hitachi 16 bits RISC microcontroller of the H8/500 family. The central control station comprises a Pentium PC and is connected to the ward beds and to the Institute general archive, continuously monitoring the ward activity and exchanging desired data with the general archive. The developed system has shown several advantages for the activity of the physicians and of the nurses, supporting management in the hard effort to harmonise needs and resources.