Prehospital Eletronic Record with use of Mobile Devices in the SAMU´s

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Design and definition scope: this definition came from the lack of healthcare information systems related to prehospital care.

Definition of the medical records: in order to define the structure and the fields to be included in the prehospital record system, surveys have been made of content and information relevant to the subject through specific medical literature and weekly meetings with medical professionals.

Development: a mobile solution was performed on the Android platform, this offers a software development platform adhering to the proposed project with free distribution. The languages used were Java and XML (Extensible Markup Language). For storage of data on the device itself , SQLite database was used with native support Android and without configuration or installation.

Evaluation: usability testing will be performed with Biomedical Informatics area experts, doctors and ordinary users, enabling the identification of limitations and possible improvements to the system. After this validation, the next step will be implementation and integration with the system already used by the SAMU.

Complete Architecture Solution

Figure 1 illustrates the data workflow of the entire solution that covers the mobile prehospital care system, demonstrated in this work.

At the location of the traumatic or nontraumatic occurrence, the service is performed and the data generated is sent by a mobile device via wireless technology for the interoperability entity on the server side (WebService). The WebService, then, will serve to create the persistence in the database, which will provide a service to be consumed by the mobile device. If there is no Wi-Fi connection, the records are stored locally on the native database of the device, and will be synchronized with the server at a future time.

In addition, the data already received and stored may be displayed and accessed through a web system for healthcare professionals located in different health services, making it possible to search, register and change records relating to medical data of patients.

The Web system that also provides access and storage is managed by the software development model Model-View-Controller (MVC). The architectural model adopted, MVC, promotes isolation between the “logic” and the user interface, allowing the possibility of developing, editing and testing each part separately.

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Architecture.

The architectural layers were described in terms of end-user needs (health care professional) in order to help achieve the management of information, with the inclusion of computational mobility. For this, we sought a communication solution (interoperability) between different applications, so we selected the WebService to carry out information exchange operations, using access to simple objects Protocol (SOAP) based on XML.

Conclusion and future work

In the application of mobile communication technology/wireless in healthcare, there is a shortage and scarcity of simple tools that provide improvements to the work of health professionals, and at the same time is not impacted by the limitations that such devices have.

This study aims to develop and implement an electronic record system of the patient for mobile devices (tablets) focused on mobile prehospital care delivered by SAMU through the collection, storage and proper synchronization of the data, ensuring consistency and integrity, so they can be consulted and modified by health professionals.

The components of the complete solution are being developed in parallel, and should be finalized soon. The mobile application is in a final stage and will be subject to further changes in its execution. Upon completion of the entire solution and the integration with the others parts, the total system will be subjected to rigorous testing, so that it is ready to be implemented in a real environment.

Acknowledgments

This work has being supported by Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Cientifico e Tecnológico (CNPq), Brazil (Grant number 457400/2013-7).

References

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