موبایل edoclink : جریان کاری موبایل وکاربرد مدیریت سند برای موسسات مراقبت بهداشتی

The exponential growth of mobile devices, like smart phones and tablets, has led to a growing ubiquitous computing paradigm, in which computing is distributed and available anytime, anywhere and supported by different devices. The document and workflow management in organizations is made through computers connected to one or several servers via a networking infrastructure. The emergence of ubiquitous computing paradigm leads those solutions to be adapted for mobile platforms. Thus, users tasks can be done in a more efficient way due to the availability of information wherever they are using a mobile device, improving both the time needed to complete tasks and organizations’ efficiency. In this paper we present the mobile version of edoclink document and workflow management solution. Edoclink system was developed by Link Consulting© and is widely implemented in several healthcare institutions.

Healthcare institutions have to prepare and process a growing amount of paper document. Some examples are the diagnostic tests, medical appointments and patient records. The nature of those documents makes them susceptible to be lost or damaged during its lifetime, mainly due to human action or accidents. Moreover, in healthcare institutions, like hospitals, the information needs to flow in real time, in particular if it is related to clinical episodes. This means that critical data has to be delivered to several players, such as doctors, nurses or administrative employees. These issues are part of a large amount of concerns, which underlie the document management and workflow management solutions. A document management solution is an information system or a set of information systems responsible for capturing, managing, storing and distributing documents related to the business processes belonging to an organization. On one hand, the implementation of a document management solution optimizes the flow of documents between employees. On the other hand, these solutions eliminate the need of paper documents by making them electronic. Thus it is possible to suppress the problems related to paper format documents. The document management solution edoclink [1] developed by Link Consulting© [2], is a renowned solution in Portugal and has a growing international expression. It has about 130 installations with more than 30000 users. This solution is implemented in several healthcare institutions like Administração Regional de Saúde do Norte (ARSA, CHLO), Saudaçor and Unidade Local de Saúde do Baixo Alentejo. In those organizations, edoclink solutions are responsible for the optimization of the administrative and expedient processes. The edoclink solution is web-based, which means that it was designed to be accessed through a web browser in a computer connected to the network. With the exponential growth of the mobile devices, such as smart phones and tablets, the migration to a ubiquitous computing paradigm emerged, meaning that many computational tasks can be done anytime and anywhere with a mobile device. This paper describes the development of mobile edoclink, a mobile solution that integrates with the existing edoclink solution. This mobile solution implements the access to workflow documents through a mobile device. It embodies access to documents information, documents, workflow and decision making while the user is on the go. It is thus intended to optimize workflows duration, leading organizations in general and healthcare institutions in particular to an improved performance when dealing with their business processes. This paper is organized as follow. In Section 2 we present the fundamental concepts needed to understand the rest of the paper. We also summarize the state of the art in mobile document management applications and their integration with desktop solutions. We proceed in Section 3 with a description of the major features analyzed in the development of mobile edoclink. In Section 4 we describe the results we have obtained and finally, in Section 5 we delineate the conclusions for our work.

Edoclink document management solution itself leads healthcare institutions (e.g. hospitals) to improvements in productivity reducing costs. This is done by dematerializing information and reducing information delivery times due to the digital nature of documents. Although this is applied to all users within the institution, users with mobility needs can cause delays when they are part of workflows because they cannot have access to the edoclink standard version everywhere. Thus, the mobile edoclink solution was developed to allow users (e.g. doctors and nurses) to interact in workflows irrespective to the mobile device they have and, at the same time, to allow them to exchange critical documents related with patients, by using mobile devices. To achieve these goals we have studied several mobile computing paradigms in order to avoid mobility related problems, such as battery lifetime issues, intermittent network connectivity and data security. Mobile edoclink application possesses the following interesting mobility concepts: application-aware adaptation, fullclient architecture and last-value cache coherency mechanism. The application-aware adaptation is of high importance to assure the stability of the operating system and, at the same time, the management of local resources and application needs. Thus, it is possible to the application to know the available resources and allocate them according to user’s needs. The full-client architecture gives the application the ability to deal with intermittent network connections. This way, the application registers user operations, emulating server functionalities, and, when it has connectivity, sends the data to the server. The last-value cache coherency policy tries to optimize the local storage, keeping copy of the last version of data only. This is possible to do in the database layer but the documents layer needs to store all documents because different versions of documents can be assigned to different distributions. The development of mobile edocink application brings to light some challenges. Despite this application allows mobile users to interact with workflows, it lacks the ability to create new distributions as well as new processes and registers. In a healthcare environment, these functionalities would help to improve the efficiency of doctors who take care of people that are at their homes. By using such functionalities, doctors may start new workflows on the fly, instead of taking note and waiting to reach a computer to start the workflow. We are also planning to develop a mobile edoclink version for iOS devices, in order to increase the range of potential users that are able to use edoclink application.