Development of patient centric virtual organizations (PCVOs) in clinical environment for patient information...

A novel Virtual Organization framework which incorporates wireless technology support is presented in the research work. The Virtual Organization is designed for a clinical environment to provide better patient information management and enhanced collaborative working of multidisciplinary care teams. The analysis studies the current clinical practices and looks at the general patient information resource structure currently in use for patient care. Based on this problem analysis and current requirements of the multi-disciplinary care team members, we propose a generic and sustainable Patient Centric Virtual Organization (PCVO) framework to complement the functionality of the existing infrastructure by incorporating wireless technologies support for improved patient information provision at the point of care. The preliminary results of the study identify and classify the specific point of care tasks suited to appropriate information resources needed by the care team members. This paper concentrates on the patient information management aspects brought in by incorporating wireless technologies at the point of care using patient information resources in a decentralized and distributed computing environment. This applied research is carried out in the secondary and tertiary care sector in the cancer domain. For the analysis and results of the pilot project, we have used a case study of a local NHS Cancer Hospital.