Application of Mobile Cloud Computing in Care pathways

Abstract

The advances in cloud computing has resulted in the introduction of several health-care services in the cloud. However, not much work has been done which utilizes Cloud computing for providing pervasive healthcare information management services on mobile devices. This paper focus on the application of Mobile Cloud Computing in Care pathways, a set of tools for managing quality of care provided to patients by medical institutions. Care pathways started in 1980s with paper-based or form-based version. Nowadays, hospitals may use the electronic version which offer greater flexibility and integration with other parts of hospital systems, and helps in reducing medical errors. Mobile cloud computing has a great potential in facilitating Care pathways in this direction. Mobility can be utilized to improve communications between the various levels of Care pathways users, as well as convenient and secured access to medical records and data. In addition, cloud computing allows the offloading of complex resource scheduling or medical processing tasks to be performed remotely reducing computing energy and equipment cost incurred by medical institutions. In this paper, we propose the techniques to develop the Care pathways software based on Mobile cloud computing technologies, the required hardware infrastructure and software components, and propose a design architecture. The objective is to foster and provide systematic guidance on development of advanced Care pathways software.