Collaborative Care Team in Open Source,
Issues and Approaches

• Summary:
• In the scope of the ISfTeH, what are the specific issues of telemedicine, out of the large domain of medical informatics? 
  
• A review of issues and considered approaches, with the following questions:
  
• How far are the issues well identified ? Which issues are still missing ? 
  
• Assuming agreements on an issues, which approaches should be considered ?
  
• Identified Issues:
• Main_issues
• Care Team Concept
• Problem Solving 
• Information Flexibility and Navigation
  
• Education 
• Integration Platform
  
• Communication strategy 
• Confidentiality
  
• Trust and responsibilities
  
• Technical collaborations, FLOSS
  
• Software architecture
  
• Network installations 
• Network security 
• Information Interoperability
• Data collection for statistics
• Healthcare Economics
• Developments management
• Exploitation management
    
  
• Main issues:
• The trend is that many specialised actors become necessary for the care of the same patient and the needed expertise is not available everywhere.  Since 50 years many excellent specialities have been developed, but the coordination has been relatively neglected.
• Telecommunications could help more, but are still underused.
• Too many custom softwares.  Up to now most softwares did focus on only one target group of users at a time, one professional specialisation, or one disease, or one context.
• Good healthcare is not yet enough available nor affordable in developing regions. A critical concern in the scope of the ISFTeH, the members coming from about 50 countries, including many developing regions.
• A more detailed analysis of the issues is presented in the next chapters of this overview of issues.
• Approaches:
  
• Objectives:
• Improved care by means of better support of collaborations between the professional actors in charge of the care of a patient, by means of telemedicine and sharing know-how in the scope of the ISfTeH, International Society of Telemedcine, http://www.isft.net/ and http://www.isft.net/cms/index.php?collaborative-care-team-in-open-source .
  The essential concept of telemedicine is seen 2 or more healthcare partners having to collaborate, even when there are not at the same location.
  The project focus on a "patient-centric multidisciplinary record".  A record belonging to the patient in which the involved care providers can share information.
• Sustainability by means of education, seen here as contextual training.
  
• A kind of health coordination platform, beginning by the most common features for the care process, as it may be necessary for any kind of diseases, for any kind of healthcare professionals, in any kind of context.  This common platform is intended to integrate additional specialised software modules.
• To share know-how, including full documentation in Open Source.
  
• Experimental prototypes in order to:
• Stimulate constructive discussions with the intended users, in front of visual examples.
• Check the feasibility of the considered up to date technologies.
• Next page: Care Team Concept