Message-Based Patient Guidance in Day-Hospital

Day hospital workflows are highly dynamic. It is, therefore, important to provide patients with timely information about their next activity, where it takes place, and when it starts. In this paper we present MobiDay, a novel mobile service integrated in the hospital information system that supports patients and clinicians in a day hospital scenario. We describe the MobiDay message-posting algorithm that uses context-aware rules provided by clinicians to decide the time and content of the guidance messages sent to the patient´s device. MobiDay was tested with real patients during a 4-months-long experiment held in the hospital of Meran in South Tyrol, Italy. Here we report on the system evaluation results. Moreover, we discuss the pros and cons of MobiDay design choices and propose some general guidelines for the development of effective message-based mobile guidance services for patients.