Plas’O’Soins: An Interactive ICT Platform to Support Care Planning and Coordination within Home-Based Care
BackgroundDue to the rising demand in home healthcare services in France as well as in other European countries, homecare organizations are facing challenges in terms of coordination and continuity of care. In both cases, the problem is linked to the efficiency in which care interventions are distributed and managed among the different participants involved in home care processes.
Project Plas’O’Soins which was developed within the framework of the French research program TecSan, aims to address these contemporary problems by providing an interactive ICT platform to improve coordination and continuity of care within homecare organizations.Main achievementsPlas’O’Soins, the software platform we designed, supports care specification as well as planning and monitoring of the care plans. It allows the modeling of care plans using a dedicated Domain Specific Language, the scheduling of care operations taking into account the human resources, the medical constraints and the geographical distribution of patients, and the monitoring of the execution of the operations by the care actors.
This software platform enables the coordination of activities and the communication between actors and reacts to unforeseen events and produces dashboards in order to quantify the effectiveness of the processes. ConclusionThe software platform has been deployed and used in an experimental setting by homecare partner organizations, providing valuable insights on the organizational changes required by the introduction of such an ICT solution in the actual practice of homecare.