Supporting Palliative Care Services - An IS System to Monitor the Patients and Manage the Mobile Support Team

摘要

The health centers group (ACES) "Douro Sul II" is creating a Community Support Team for Palliative Care (ECSCP) in order to provide palliative care services for the ACES's population of 73,713 registered users. The team comes as a follow-up from a strategic plan, recently issued by the health ministry, in order to serve the patients in their own homes, providing the necessary support to them, to their families, and their caregivers. This approach has several benefits for the patients and their families, as well as for the healthcare system itself. To further promote the effectiveness of the ECSCP team, it was planned to develop an information system (IS), comprising several application modules, with the main objective to monitor the patients in their homes and deliver information to support the planning and execution of the ECSCP team activities. The system is based on an electronic services platform and several mobile and web applications, to be used by the patients, team's staff and coordination. This way, we expect to overcome the geographic issues of the ACES territory, as well as the team's human resources constraints, while remotely monitoring the patients and providing the necessary support, if and when needed, contributing to maintaining the conditions for the patients to live with dignity and quality in the comfort of their own homes.