Caregiver coordination as an enabler to a hospital to home initiative within the context of healthcare delivery

Abstract

The Hospital to Home architecture aims to provide a successful transition for patients leaving the hospital in order to improve health outcomes and minimize hospital readmission. This thesis analyzes the current hospital to home system, explores its flows and proposes a better architecture to improve the patient transition from the hospital to home. It makes a significant contribution by proposing a new architecture based on a patient-centric approach within the framework of the Hospital to Home (H2H) initiative called Caregiver Coordination. In this architecture, we propose the creation of a web and mobile based application that allows patients and caregivers to interact easily with each other to help manage the patient's wellbeing. We include a short summary illustrating how this new architecture can address the two main problems: (1) the decentralization of the discharge plan and (2) the dependency on the interactions among diverse stakeholders. We propose to: 1. Analyze and critique the existing hospital to home architecture 2. Follow an existing architecture pattern/framework 3. Recommend a new architecture 4. Create a Caregiver Coordination application using an open source framework to enable a successful transition of patients from hospital to home