Information and logistics for homecare

TELECOS is a regional project whose ambition is to use new cooperation tools, in the context of homecare, in order to facilitate the coordinated cooperative work of health actors. Homecare can improve the quality of life for the patient and reduce costs but it also induces a lot of difficulties during organisation and care. We aim at knowing more about the activity of cooperation in the homecare context and proposing a cooperation platform which answers to the specific needs generated during homecare and which integrates new applications. In this paper, we present the results of our study of homecare. The activity analysis leads us to determine two specific processes: one concerns the implementation of human and material resources and design of the homecare protocol (the logistics process) and the other concerns the coordination of the healthcare actors during effective homecare (the care process). The first process is composed of five main phases during which an healthcare professional is required as coordinator. We then present the Worklow model used to represent the cooperation activity in homecare. We describe the activity: the tasks and subtasks are represented in a declarative way. We then briefly present our prototype, devoted to homecare management, implementing the different phases of the information process, developed in JAVA.