Non-disruptive value-chains in home health care

Abstract: Treatment of elderly people and citizens in need of professional care is one of the most important aspects of any society to consider that aims at support for quality of life. Support for such qualitative aspects of a modern society often manifests itself by means of value-chains. However, all activities that a business or organization uses are not included in the value-chain, it is only the activities and information that generate any kind of value for the users in a particular organization that are included in the value-chains. To that end, the locality of health care related information primarily exists at the hospital and, therefore, the care of patients is most efficiently carried out at the hospital. However, if the involved information can be accessed anywhere throughout the value-chain, a possible situation would be to keep the patients in their homes without disrupting already established work practice and related value-chains. In principle, introducing new technology must not disrupt a value-chain; it must preserve or, even better, improve it. Health care is becoming more mobile and needs support for such behavior. The quantitative value to the user is quantified by means of value-chains, so it is important that they remain non-disrupted. Consequently, the fundamental concepts dealt with in this thesis are; value-chains, health care and mobile technology. The problem domain is distributed health care and we have chosen to focus on sustainability of the involved value-chains. In essence, we want to add new technology to the domain without disrupting already existing value-chains. This in order to make the distributed health care apparatus more efficient and cost effective. The main problem we have identified is regarding how medical doctors and nurses could access the same information in patients' homes as they can at the hospital.