JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

A hospital is an unfamiliar place to patients because of its style, atmosphere, and procedures. These hospital characteristics cause patients to lose their way in hospitals and become confused about responding to protocols, which slows down the procedural flows. Some additional IT infrastructure facilities and human resources may be needed to solve these problems. However, this solution needs high investment and cannot guarantee an accuracy of information sent to patients. To handle this limitation, EasyHos have been developed to help patients recognize their status during their stay in a hospital using all existing infrastructure and hospital's data and without changing existing hospital's process.

Objective:

The objective of this study is to provide a design of the EasyHos system and the case study in hospitals in Thailand. The design is usable and repeatable for small and medium sized hospitals where internet infrastructure is in place.

Methods:

The EasyHos system has been designed based on existing infrastructure, hospital's data and hospital's process. The main components include mobile devices, existing hospital's data, wireless communication network. The EasyHos system was deployed to two small- and medium-sized hospitals in Thailand. The experimental process was focused on solving the problem of unfamiliarity in the hospital. The criteria and pretest conditions regarding the unfamiliarity problem have been defined before the experiment.

Results:

The results are presented in terms of criteria, pretest conditions, posttest conditions in the Hospitals. The posttest conditions amplify the experimental result and the impact of the system on users, such as hospital nurse/staff and patients. For example, the number of patients who asked nurses/hospital staff decreased 83.3% while nurses/hospital staff have 5 minutes more to do their routine work each day. Additionally, another impact is that hospitals can create new information values from existing data, which now can be visible and valuable to patients.

Conclusions:

The hospitals’ unfamiliarity problem has been reduced by the EasyHos system. The system has eased the nurses/hospital staff members and patients while they are working or waiting in the hospital. The nurses/hospital staff members would have more time to do their routine works. The hospital can easily setup the EasyHos system while the implementation cost is low or near zero.