Adoption of a PDA-based home hospice care system for cancer patients

This study describes a systematic and efficient point-of-care home hospice information system, which can effectively manage patient information and can easily be incorporated into a home hospice service using wired and/or wireless communications and mobile computing technology. To help with the design of a portable home hospice information system, we analyzed the services provided by visiting nurses and the opinions of users, based on the 2005 Guidelines for Cancer Patient Management Program of the Ministry of Health and Welfare of Korea. We performed a service trial with three experienced visiting nurses. A visiting nurse can use a PDA, implementing the hospice information system, to accomplish tasks that range from registering a new patient to performing nursing services based on the patient's condition, as well as accessing guidelines and searching past information for better nursing performance. The system resulted in a saving of 8.5 minutes in recoding time. We expect the findings of this study to help field workers in community nursing care by reducing unnecessary paperwork and by enabling improvements in the quality of point-of-care services.