Virtual Remote Nursing system

Demands for better health services have resulted in the enhancement of electronic health (eHealth) systems with newer concepts such as being patient-centric, easy to use, and having smarter interactions and more accurate decisions. While eHealth services aim to provide continuous medical and health services for both consumers and medical practitioners, access to allied healthcare experts such as nurses is still a challenge. In this paper, we propose a new framework, Virtual Remote Nursing (VRN) that provides a virtual nurse agent installed on the client´s personal computer or smart phone to help manage the client´s health condition continuously. With this approach, medical practitioners can assign different tasks to a virtual nurse using a generic task definition mechanism, where a task is defined as a combination of medical workflow, operational guidelines, and associated data. VRN is controlled by practitioners who decide on the patient´s treatment. This allows a VRN to act as a personalized full-time nurse for its client, by performing practitioner support tasks, using data collected on the client´s health condition. Such patient information could be obtained from an electronic Personal Health Record (ePHR) system such as Google Health or Microsoft Health Vault. We have developed a prototype system that enables traditional client applications and healthcare provider systems to collaborate using a VRN system. Finally, through a case study, we demonstrate how diabetic patients can take advantage of this system.