Information Architecture in Pervasive Healthcare

The concept of pervasive healthcare has emerged in the early twenty-first century. It aims to provide healthcare services to anyone, anytime and anywhere by integrating seamlessly the primary, secondary and tertiary healthcare service provisions. This ensures patients are covered with healthcare services when needed. In addition, clinicians can obtain the real time information by accessing the electronic patient record that supports decision making in providing health services. Pervasive healthcare involves real time systems integration, mobile devices and high speed wireless network connection. This can improve patient safety and healthcare quality and reduce the elevating operational costs where patients can be monitored remotely without needing to use the facilities in a hospital. Health informatics, according to the UK National Health Service (NHS) is defined as the knowledge, skills and tool which enable information to be collected, managed, used and shared to support the delivery of healthcare services. The importance of health informatics is to gain understanding of clinical, social, business and technical needs of hospital required to integrate systems, improve patient safety and care quality, and help the clinicians and patient working better together. The core element in health informatics is information itself. It is vital to understand the information flow and information field in a pervasive healthcare environment. Information flow is about knowing how information is transmitted across systems that support certain clinical pathways whereas information field contains a set of shared norms that portraits how clinicians and patients behave. Information architecture (IA) is a high level map of information requirements of an organisation that also consists of the information flow and information field. The purpose of the IA is to provide right data at the right time, location and process to the right stakeholder with a right motivation. Organisational semiotics, a fundamental theory for information and communication, helps in understanding the nature of information. It deals with information and information systems in a balanced way, taking account of both the physical space (when physical actions take place) and the information space (which are mainly characterised by information and communication using signs, symbols and data). Sharing information for multi-stakeholders for making decisions and taking appropriate actions is essential for pervasive healthcare. The information architecture can be reflected in information systems implementation such as electronic patient record (EPR) and other forms. This keynote speech aims to discuss the notion of information architecture for pervasive healthcare collaborating with multiple stakeholders (i.e. clinicians, patients) in decision support from semiotics perspective. An example will be shown towards the end of the presentation.