Design and implementation of a handover support system based on information recommendation in nursing homes

Abstract

A handover support system that supports care workers to share information and knowledge on patients and nursing-care work based on information recommendation is described. A handover is time consuming work because it takes much time to write and retrieve information on patients. We investigated the handover work in a nursing home, and found that about 25% of the work time was spent for sharing information among care workers. The aim of this study is to support care workers to share handover information efficiently. For this aim, we propose a novel handover support system called DANCE (Dynamic Action and kNowledge assistant for Collaborative sErvice fields) that supports care workers to share information and knowledge on patients and nursing-care work based on information recommendation. The system has following functions; (1) a function for recommending handover information based on attribute names and their values, (2) a function for recommending free-text contents of handover information, and (3) a function for sharing multimedia information. We had experiments for evaluating effectiveness of the system, and confirmed that the system can reduce the time for sharing handover information through a day compared to the time based on a notebook. We compared the work time for sharing two types of handover infomation between the system and notebook conditions; (a) information on patients and nursing-care work which is stored as pairs of attribute names and their values, (b) free-text contents on patients. Results of experiments revealed that the system can reduce the time for the former type of information as 55.2% (64.0s) per person a day compared to the notebook condition, and 59.0% (200s) for the latter type of information. An overview of the system and results of experiments are described.