Ubiquitous mobility in clinical healthcare

Abstract

This paper sets out a solution for providing physicians and nurses with access to a number of health care information systems whilst mobile in two clinical settings. Firstly supporting physicians whilst mobile within a hospital, and secondly whilst external to the hospital environment. This provides physicians with ubiquitous mobility in clinical healthcare. We first present results of our mobile health care solution that provided hospital professionals with access to patient data using a personal digital assistant (PDA) over a wireless local area network. We then extend our experiences of the eHospital solution together with several other projects that combine the use of a PDA over a GSM/CDMA mobile network for real-time access to information systems. By extending our experiences, we present our proven reference architecture for a secure enterprise mobile healthcare solution for hospital physicians and nurses. The solution furnishes access to several medical information systems whilst supporting a capability to roam within and outside the hospital environment. We accomplish this with seamless roaming between the 802.11 and GSM/CDMA mobile networks.