Borboleta: a mobile telehealth system for primary homecare

ABSTRACT

Public homecare programs such as the Brazilian Family Health program, initiated in the late 1990s, have proven to be a very effective tool for Preventive Medicine. The goal of these programs is to bring physicians, nurses, and social workers to the homes of the lower income population in lesser-attended regions within multi-million people metropolis.

However, there is practically no IT support for the operation of these programs, leading to inefficiencies. For example, in a particular Primary Homecare Program our group is involved with, nurses visit the homes of their patients carrying a pencil and a piece of paper and, during their visits, found themselves isolated from the Primary Healthcare Center, the University Hospital, and the physicians who could provide them with important information to improve the quality of the services they provide. Each visit associated with the program results in a three-page report, which is handwritten and stored in cabinets, with no possibility for information summarization, statistical analysis, or data mining.

In this paper, we describe the architectural design, the prototype implementation, and our preliminary experiences with the Borboleta system, whose goal is to use Mobile Computing technologies to promote digital inclusion as well as to improve the quality of Preventive Healthcare services offered by the public sector. We focus primarily in developing software that runs on PDAs used by health professionals while providing home healthcare. Currently, nurses of the Primary Healthcare Center are testing the system and starting to use it on medical visits.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  J. Computer Applications
  J.3 LIFE AND MEDICAL SCIENCES

Keywords:
homecare, mobile computing, mobile databases, preventive medicine, telehealth, telemedicine