Ehealth for patient safety : quantitative performance assessment of the Remine platform

According to recent studies, Risks Against Patient Safety (RAPS) represent one of the most important factors of dead in hospitals: during therapy, more than 8% of patients recovered in hospitals suffer for additional disease that in almost 50% of the cases produce either dead or significant additional health problems. RAPS occur in any stage of the patient care process. REMINE project idea originates from the common difficulty in conducting the analysis, early identification and effective prevention on RAPS when there are significant mass of inhomogeneous data sources, stored in multimedia databases, as well as distributed environments with different care professionals contemporary involved. To contrast the RAPS trends and the malpractices diffusion, REMINE prosecutes a number of main objectives. a new technological platform, new care process organizational requirements. Main elements are: mining of multimedia data; modelling, prediction, detection of RAPS, RAPS management support system and info broker patient safety framework. Main outcomes of REMINE will be: time reduction in collecting data, time reduction in RAPS analysis, standardization of common language, evolution in the interaction model, reference framework, patient safety improvement, health-care cost saving ReMINE has been tested on 2 pilot hospitals in Italy, namely stroke management (Niguarda, Italy) and labor monitoring (Sacco, Italy) and the assessment of ReMINE impacts in these pilots has been completed in this thesis. ReMINE is not designed to change clinical pathways but to better support them. At each hospital, ReMINE’s impact assessment has been done via different indicators. In this study brief information about the recent status of patient safety is given, current e-Health market and its potential are explained. Moreover, data analysis of ReMINE will be performed and its benefits and potential is discussed. ReMINE does not affect directly to protocols to change them ,but aim to improve and support them. ReMINE directly impacts the process of care and has an indirect impact on clinical outcomes. All in all, the assessment showed that ReMINE is more effective in detecting and signaling RAPS than AS-IS processes and facilitates the adherence of daily clinical practice to the clinical protocol or guidelines adopted by the organization.