Publication

Self-service kiosk-based anamnesis system for emergency departments

Bibliographic Details
Summary:	Emergency departments have a higher number of visits compared to other hospital de partments. Technology has played a crucial role in promoting improvements in hospital management and clinical performance. The number of visits to emergency departments has increased considerably, giving rise to crowding situations that cause several adverse effects. This situation negatively affects the provision of emergency services, impairs the quality of health care and increases the time patients wait for medical check-up. One of the leading causes contributing to the crowding is the high number of patients with low severity clinical condition. These are referred to as non-urgent or inappropriate patients, whose clinical situation should be taken care through self-care or primary health care. It is the responsibility of the institutions to analyse and quantify the possible causes of crowding to find the best solution to mitigate the adverse effects caused. It is believed that non-urgent patients can use the time spent in the waiting room more productively, namely by using a self-service kiosk to which they can provide valuable information to facilitate and accelerate the clinical processing. This work proposes a solution to be used in the waiting room of emergency departments, which aims to reduce the period of medical check-up. The solution uses a self-service kiosk for the patient to provide relevant clinical data that would otherwise have to be collected by the physician during the clinical observation process. In particular, the kiosk will collect vital signs, past medical history, main complaint and usual medication. This data will be processed and provided to the physician in a structured and uniform way before each medical check-up. The primary purpose of this solution is to reduce the period of patients’ medical check-up and thus improve the response capacity of the emergency departments with the same resources. During the Master’s work period, an Android application was implemented for patients to enter the clinical data mentioned above, and a Web application for physicians to access it. Additionally, a data warehouse was implemented to store the data in a consolidated way to discover hidden relationships and patterns in the data. The first moment of evaluation, undertaken in a non-hospital facility, shows positive acceptability by participants, with a large majority considering the system user-friendly. Due to the pandemic, it was impossible to perform the second planned evaluation moment in a real emergency environment.
Main Authors:	Pacheco, Paulo Alexandre Gonçalves
Subject:	Health Kiosk Self-Service Kiosk Emergency department Crowding Primary care Quiosque de saúde Self-Service quiosque Serviço de urgências Lotação hospitalar Cuidados primários Engenharia e Tecnologia::Engenharia Eletrotécnica, Eletrónica e Informática
Year:	2021
Country:	Portugal
Document type:	master thesis
Access type:	open access
Associated institution:	Universidade do Minho
Language:	English
Origin:	RepositóriUM - Universidade do Minho