Design and Implementation of an Open System Platform for Nursing Home Medical Information System

[[abstract]]In Taiwan, the growth of population has been declining steadily and the society is changing into an aging population society. According to the “survey report on aging population” from the Ministry of the Interior, 56% of the elder persons have some types of long term illness, and 9% have difficulty in daily life activities. At the end of October of 2005, the count of aging population is 2.2 million people, representing 9.7% of the total population in Taiwan. This aging population is projected to rise to 20% by 2030. In other words, there will be about 4.6 million elder persons by 2030 and one elder person in ten will need long-term care. Nowadays small family and two income family are the norm of new society structure. Once an elder person is ill, if one of the younger generation family member needs to stop working and take care of him or her full-time, the whole family and their financial resources will certainly be under severe stress. Under this scenario, the long-term elder care institution will play an important role to look after those elder persons instead. Not only there will be professional nurses to take care of them, but also the family members can continue working without break. According to the statistical information from the Ministry of the Interior, there are currently 915 long-term elder care and rehabilitation centers in Taiwan at the end of October of 2005. As a common practice in the past, elder care and rehabilitation centers contact relatives of the elder persons by telephone to inform them current status of their loved ones every so often. But using telephone is neither economical nor prompt. This research paper will describe the design and implementation of an open system platform for Elder care Medical Information System that will provide variety of functions related to elder care and rehabilitation. At beginning of the research, my advising professor and I visit Fong-Yan Elder cane and Rehabilitation enter. We studied their current medical information system in the center and find out the center’s daily work flow. For instance, the care workers need to observe and document elder patient’s health condition and fill out forms accordingly etc. According to the work flow process, we designed an open system platform, including front-end client and back-end server and the related database subsystem. This design not only provided system platform for elder care medical information system and RSS functions, but also provided a mechanism for adding new system functions later on. For RSS function under this platform, all concerned family member just need to set up the RSS reader with the Center. Then they can get the most current news concerning their loved ones, provide suggestions and ask related questions through the Web Server, thereby achieving effective, fast, convenient, easy and low cost communication platform