Improving Community Healthcare Assistance Through an Innovative and Multidisciplinary Systemic Approach

A 4.0 customized approach for community healthcare assistance requires the adoption of advanced technologies and a well-defined strategy to maximize efficiency and service quality. The purpose of such approach is to promote community healthcare management by enhancing patients’ self-awareness of their own health status, making them an active participant of their care journey, and simultaneously supporting nurses in home care settings. We proposed a multidisciplinary innovative systemic approach called smartHUB that focuses on end-users engagement from the initial stages and throughout the design process. Several non-profit communities were actively engaged in order to identify their needs and discuss on potential Information and Communication Technology (ICT) tools that could effectively improve territorial care. The proposed solution consisted of an app, the PROASSIST 4.0 App, designed for health data collection through self-monitoring by patients or during home visits by nurses. Our preliminary results on the use of PROASSIST 4.0 App by home-visit nurses indicated that such technology had a good level of usability and functionality, despite being in a development and tuning phase. This approach opens the possibility of identifying new ICT tools with widespread adoption among healthcare providers, thus having the potential of improving community healthcare nursing assistance.