Internet System Supporting the Work of Nurses in Long-Term Geriatric Care

Abstract

Abstract The development of health sciences along with the continuous technological progress contribute to the emergence of web applications. There exist many applications supporting the work of doctors, whereas the market definitely lacks solutions supporting the work of nurses. This is particularly evident in long-term geriatric home care, in which the nursing specialization is developing rapidly. Care of elderly patients requires the nurse to collect medical documents from each visit. Considering the large number of diseases affecting elderly people and the number of required visits – which should exceed 4 a week – a decision was made to develop an Internet application supporting the work of nurses in long-term geriatric care. The application facilitates the process of geriatric patient description in order to eliminate the need for filling in paper medical records. This study presents the method of developing an Internet application supporting the work of nurses in long-term geriatric care. The software was developed based on an analysis of conclusions from a social study carried out in a group of 42 nurses providing geriatric long-term home medical care services in the district of Białystok, Poland. The aim of the study was to determine the features, functionality, and declarative interest in using the software. Conclusions from the analysis indicated that the attempt to develop the application had been justified. Moreover, conclusions from the social survey formed the basis for formulating the design assumptions. The web application was developed in the following technologies: HTML 5, CSS3, JavaScript, PHP 7, and MySQL. First, a prototype of the solution was tested in a XAMPP environment. After successful tests, the app was tested in a nursing practice. The obtained test results raise high hopes for potential commercialization of the application.