An Intelligent Clinical Decision Support System for Assessing the Needs of a Long-Term Care Plan

With the global aging population, providing effective long-term care has been promoted and emphasized for reducing the hospitalizations of the elderly and the care burden to hospitals and governments. Under the scheme of Long-term Care Project 2.0 (LTCP 2.0), initiated in Taiwan, two types of long-term care services, i.e., institutional care and home care, are provided for the elderly with chronic diseases and disabilities, according to their personality, living environment and health situation. Due to the increasing emphasis on the quality of life in recent years, the elderly expect long-term care service providers (LCSP) to provide the best quality of care (QoC). Such healthcare must be safe, effective, timely, efficiently, diversified and up-to-date. Instead of supporting basic activities in daily living, LCSPs have changed their goals to formulate elderly-centered care plans in an accurate, time-efficient and cost-effective manner. In order to ensure the quality of the care services, an intelligent clinical decision support system (ICDSS) is proposed for care managers to improve their efficiency and effectiveness in assessing the long-term care needs of the elderly. In the ICDSS, artificial intelligence (AI) techniques are adopted to distinguish and formulate personalized long-term care plans by retrieving relevant knowledge from past similar records.