BACKGROUND Consumer-driven homecare models support aging and disabled individuals to live independently through the services of homecare workers. Although these models have benefits, including autonomy and control over services, little evidence exists about challenges homecare workers may face when providing services, including workplace violence and the negative outcomes associated with workpl...

BACKGROUND Despite the recent growth in home health services, data on clinical outcomes and acute health care utilization among older adults receiving homecare services are sparse. Obtaining such data is particularly relevant in Ontario where an increasing number of frail seniors receiving homecare are awaiting placement in long-term care facilities. In order to determine the feasibility of a l...

An e-message system is one of the promising communication tools for fostering better collaboration between hospitals and municipal-based homecare services. However, hospital care is often confronted with patients that need a myriad of services after discharge, of which municipal homecare is only one. We conducted a qualitative interview study to examine hospital health professionals’ experience...

Most of the industrialized countries are facing a new situation which is the increasing number of elderly people and the enormous cost of associated healthcare. IT-based homecare services have been proposed as a solution to alleviate this problem. However, the adoption of the homecare services is hindered by the fact that there are many heterogeneous IT solutions, which prevent interoperability...

background & aim: nowadays, home health care services play significant roles in modern societies. such services allow the elderly and needy people to pass their treatment process at their own houses in a friendly environment. in this paper, weekly routing and scheduling problem of home health care personnel was investigated. methods & materials: insufficient number of expert personnel or overla...

Future homecare networks will consist of a very wide range of embedded services and software that will often rely on numerous other components to achieve their tasks. They will rarely operate in a self sufficient manner. The ability to discover and use services is not however a trivial task. Services may provide raw data, such as temperature readings, or higher contextual data, such as user act...

BACKGROUND E-homecare creates opportunities to provide care faster, at lower cost and higher levels of convenience for patients. As e-homecare services are time-critical, stringent requirements are imposed in terms of total response time and reliability, this way requiring a characterization of their network load and usage behavior. However, it is usually hard to build testbeds on a realistic s...

THEORY Social homecare is important for older people, as it enables them to remain in their own homes during worsening health, thus relieving the burden on institutional facilities such as homes for the elderly or nursing homes and hospitals. METHOD A representative survey of social homecare users was employed to assess determinants of the scope of social homecare in Slovenia. Multiple regres...

Since 1997, the number of homecare clients in Canada has increased by 51% [1]. As suggested by Masotti et al. in this issue of the International Journal of Quality in Health Care, this dramatic increase in the amount, acuity and complexity of healthcare being provided in peoples' homes has grown at a much faster pace than has the body of research on patient safety, which to date has focused pre...

Providing IT-based care support for elderly at home is proposed as a highly promising appraoch to address the aging population problem. With the emergence of homecare application service providers, a homecare system can be seen as a linked set of services. Configuring and composing existing homecare application services to create new homecare composite applications can reduce the application de...