New mHealth hospital selection framework supporting decentralised telemedicine architecture for outpatient cardiovascular disease-based integrated techniques: Haversine-GPS and AHP-VIKOR

Abstract

Cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) are conditions involving the heart or blood vessels which need specialised and urgent care. Centralised telemedicine is a client–server architecture fit for cardiovascular care, especially for monitoring health conditions, delivering healthcare services and providing other remote services by using mHealth. However, several challenges and unsolved issues remain, including (1) provision of healthcare services data in terms of hospital connectivity and continuous updates of all transactions occurring across distributed hospital networks for patient data, (2) lack of an accurate mHealth method to estimate time between patients with CVD and telemedicine hospitals for hospitalisation and (3) lack of investigation of important criteria for hospital evaluation. To develop a new mHealth framework for the evaluation and prioritisation of decentralised telemedicine hospitals based on integrated techniques Haversine-Global Positioning System (GPS) and analytical hierarchy process (AHP)-VIseKriterijumska Optimizacija I Kompromisno Resenje (VIKOR). The framework can serve all health emergency levels (i.e. risk, urgent and sick) of patients with CVD. Three methodology phases were developed. First is the identification of important decentralised hospital criteria which affect hospital evaluation to create a new dataset for this context. Second is the development of a new mHealth framework phase consequent of four development sequences: new integrated distance measurement through Haversine-based on GPS for time estimation for the convenient remote interaction with hospitals, combination for new hospital datasets and development of three decision matrixes based on a crossover of (1) healthcare service packages/time of arrival of patient at the hospital criteria and (2) lists of hospitals for evaluation and prioritisation using integration AHP-VIKOR techniques. Third is the objective validation of the constructed results. In addition, the proposed framework is evaluated by using a checklist benchmarking procedure. Experimental results reveal that the new mHealth framework is effective in decentralised telemedicine architecture and verify the ability of all connected hospitals. The new integrated distance measurement technique boosts the overall methodology of hospital evaluation and supports the combination of the new hospital datasets for prioritisation configuration. The proposed mHealth framework offers healthcare services for all emergence levels of patients with CVD through the blockchain concept and decision making theory. Objective validation reveals significant differences between the scores of groups, indicating that the ranking results are valid for the three decision matrices. Evaluation results show that the proposed mHealth framework exhibits an advantage over the benchmark frameworks with a percentage of 66.67% intersection with six comparison points highlighted by the academic literature.