Mobility in Healthcare for Remote Intensive Care Unit Clinical Management

Abstract

This chapter reviews current research directions in healthcare mobility and assesses its impact on the provision of remote intensive care unit (ICU) clinical management. Intensive care units boast a range of state of the art medical monitoring devices to monitor a patient’s physiological parameters. They also have devices such as ventilators to offer mechanical life support. Computing and IT support within ICUs has focused on monitoring the patients and delivering corresponding alarms to care providers. However many intensive care unit admissions are via intra and inter health care facility transfer, requiring receiving care providers to have access to patient information prior to the patient’s arrival. This indicates that opportunities exist for mobile gadgets, such as personal digital assistants (PDAs) to substantially increase the efficiency and effectiveness of processes surrounding healthcare in the ICUs. The challenge is to transcend the use of these mobile devices beyond the current usage for personal information management and static medical applications; also to overcome the challenges of screen size and memory limitations. Finally, the deployment of mobile-enabled solutions within the healthcare domain is hindered by privacy, cost and security considerations and a lack of standards. These are some of the significant topics discussed in this chapter.