Situational Awareness for Enhanced Patient Management

Patient management in hospital environments with the provision of effective care pathways represents a significant challenge. Hospital settings are characterized by uncertainty driven by the need to accommodate both elective treatments and emergency cases [which generally arrive without warning, this can place great strain on the healthcare system. This paper considers these issues along with the potential technological developments which may provide a solution to the challenges faced by healthcare professionals (or at least mitigate the impact of the challenging complex and dynamic hospital environment). It is postulated that technology enhanced patient management based on situational awareness in intelligent context-aware systems has the capability to improve patient experience along with improvements in resource utilization in a hospital setting.