Quality of Clinical Data Aware Telemedicine Systems

Modern day telemedicine systems make use of clinical data to provide clinical services to patients and medical professionals.  Though technology has advanced over the years, the quality of the measured clinical data may not always fulfill the medical quality requirements, particularly due to technological context variations (i.e. technical disruptions). Such clinical data quality degradation may lead to undesirable outcomes which can put a patient’s safety at risk.

This research provides insights into a generic quality of clinical data (QoD) aware telemedicine system. We propose a Context-Layering Technique that bridges the gap between the technological context and the clinical context. This way, the clinical context can adapt when the clinical data degrades due to technological context variations.

We propose an architecture which comprises a QoD Broker component, which is in charge of computing clinical data quality, and a guideline-based clinical decision support system, which has the ability to adapt treatment decisions when clinical data quality varies. The QoD-aware telemedicine system prototype has been evaluated in the context of MobiGuide FP7 European project with successful results.