Information Architecture in Pervasive Healthcare

Abstract

The concept of pervasive healthcare has emerged in the earlytwenty-first century. It aims to provide healthcare services to anyone,anytime and anywhere by integrating seamlessly the primary, secondaryand tertiary healthcare service provisions. This ensures patients arecovered with healthcare services when needed. In addition, clinicianscan obtain the real time information by accessing the electronic patientrecord that supports decision making in providing health services.Pervasive healthcare involves real time systems integration, mobiledevices and high speed wireless network connection. This can improvepatient safety and healthcare quality and reduce the elevatingoperational costs where patients can be monitored remotely withoutneeding to use the facilities in a hospital. Health informatics,according to the UK National Health Service (NHS) is defined as theknowledge, skills and tool which enable information to be collected,managed, used and shared to support the delivery of healthcare services.The importance of health informatics is to gain understanding ofclinical, social, business and technical needs of hospital required tointegrate systems, improve patient safety and care quality, and help theclinicians and patient working better together. The core element inhealth informatics is information itself. It is vital to understand theinformation flow and information field in a pervasive healthcareenvironment. Information flow is about knowing how information istransmitted across systems that support certain clinical pathwayswhereas information field contains a set of shared norms that portraitshow clinicians and patients behave.Information architecture (IA) is a high level map of informationrequirements of an organisation that also consists of the informationflow and information field. The purpose of the IA is to provide rightdata at the right time, location and process to the right stakeholderwith a right motivation. Organisational semiotics, a fundamental theoryfor information and communication, helps in understanding the nature ofinformation. It deals with information and information systems in abalanced way, taking account of both the physical space (when physicalactions take place) and the information space (which are mainlycharacterised by information and communication using signs, symbols anddata). Sharing information for multi-stakeholders for making decisionsand taking appropriate actions is essential for pervasive healthcare.The information architecture can be reflected in information systemsimplementation such as electronic patient record (EPR) and other forms.This keynote speech aims to discuss the notion of informationarchitecture for pervasive healthcare collaborating with multiplestakeholders (i.e. clinicians, patients) in decision support fromsemiotics perspective. An example will be shown towards the end of thepresentation.