A Telemedicine Model for Integrating Point-of-Care Testing into a Distributed Health-Care Environment

Abstract

Centralized testing demands costly laboratories, which are inefficient and may provide poor services. Recent advances make it feasible to move clinical testing nearer to patients and the requesting physicians, thus reducing the time to treatment internet technologies can be used to create a virtual laboratory information system in a distributed health-care environment. This allows clinical testing to be transferred to a cooperative scheme of several point-of-care testing (POCT) nodes. Two pilot virtual laboratories were established, one in Italy (AUSL Modena) and one in Greece (Athens Medical Centre). They were constructed on a three-layer model to allow both technical and clinical verification. Different POCT devices were connected. The pilot sites produced good preliminary results in relation to user acceptance, efficiency, convenience and costs. Decentralized laboratories can be expected to become cost-effective.

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Hix

Hartson

. Developing User Interfaces. Ensuring Usability Through Product and Process. Chichester: Wiley, 1993.

http://www.poccic.org. Connectivity Industry Consortium. The Universal Connectivity Standard for Point of Care. Last checked 1 March 2002.

ETSI Technical Committee. Human Factors Guide for Usability Evaluations of Telecommunications Systems and Services, Technical Report ETR 095, DTR/HF-3001. European Telecommunications Standards Institute, 1993.