The need for health and social care for community-dwelling elderly is on the rise as the population ages. Through the provision of comprehensive services by multiple professionals in local communities, elderly people can receive continual care in a non-medical setting, which is favourable for early detection and intervention of potential problems. However, the lack of digitalization in primary care affects the effectiveness of the services and precludes full exploitation of the data. This study proposed an information system dedicated to caring for community-dwelling elderly people and investigated its
acceptance and usability.

The system was designed to align with the workflow of community care centres. The data generated during care delivery, involving socio-demographic and data, bio-measurements and health assessments and questionnaires, were digitized for effective management and information exchange, which could also serve as a source of healthcare predictive intelligence. Interoperability was attained by adopting the health information exchange standard Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) and the terminology standards Logical Observation Identifiers Names and Codes (LOINC) and Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine-Clinical Terms (SNOMED-CT). The system was implemented with a tiered architecture that permitted a fast and decoupled method to introduce FHIR to existing systems without modification.

Selected Publications

• K.S. Choi, S.H. Chan, C.L. Ho, M. Matejak, Development of a Healthcare Information System for Community Care of Older Adults and Evaluation of Its Acceptance and Usability, Digital Health, vol. 20, no. 8, 2022. (doi)