APPification of hospital healthcare and data management using QRcodes

Abstract

In this work, we describe an integrated system, developed for use by the healthcare personnel within healthcare facilities, adapted to smartphones, tablets and handheld devices. Our key goal is to facilitate doctors, nurses and the involved personnel throughout the facility, regardless of the existence of network connection in the area using a typical smartphone. The proposed application and its backend system support access to patient's history, i.e. previous diagnoses, medication, and specification of allergies. More features include updates on the progress of the patient, sending referrals directly to hematology, microbiology or biochemistry laboratory and instant notification for the retrieval of laboratory results within a hospital or any healthcare institution. Additionally, we integrate Quick Response (QR code) for coding and accessing medical related data of the patient using a smartphone or a tablet, to be used by the facility itself or anyone else certified. The QR code significantly improves interoperability cases for legacy and non interrelated systems based on HL7 and XML transformation of the HL7 patient referrals.