Members

Françoise André, Erwan Saint Pol

Motivations

Today in most hospital departments, every caregiver writes the prescriptions on a paper during the consultations and at the end of the consultations the prescriptions are entered by a secretary into the Hospital Information System (HIS).This is a time-consuming, highly error prone process due to the possible errors the secretary can introduce in the prescriptions document and the possible need for the caregiver to reconsider her/his prescriptions if incompatibilities with other medicines appear.

Objective

The objective of the Charcot project is to allow a caregiver to make prescriptions when being at patient's bed, using a mobile computer connected to the HIS through a wireless network. Using Charcot, a direct interaction between the caregiver and the HIS is possible at any time preventing the need for the secretary to integrate prescriptions and allowing the caregiver to immediatly detect medidine incompatibilities or even their unavailability.

Charcot adapts the transactions processing depending on the wireless network quality of communication. When connection is good, transactions are executed directly on the HIS. Otherwise, they are executed on the mobile device and then integrated to the HIS when bandwidth becomes rich enough.

The Charcot software is a middleware located between the mobile host and the HIS, which provides four services:

• a reliable communication service,
• a data replication service,
• a data prefetching service,
• an execution service that changes the location of transactions executions.

The adaptation facilities of this middleware correspond to the main concept of the MolèNE system.

This project has been supported by the Brittany regional ITR program and has been realized with the collaboration of the SIB (Syndicat Interhospitalier de Bretagne) and the Saint Malo Hospital.

Publications