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BackgroundDue to the challenges faced by health and social care systems, in particular those related to actual demographic trends, home care emerges as a potentially cost-effective solution to answer the needs of citizens, and to allow the reallocation of resources to alternatives to hospitalization or institutionalization. ObjectiveHome care services require cooperation between different actors, including health and social caregivers, care receivers, and their informal caregivers (eg, relatives or friends), across time, space, and organizational boundaries. Therefore, it is foreseeable that eHealth services can contribute to their improvement. The aim of this study is to evaluate information persistence services based on the Reference Information Model (RIM) of the Health Level Seven (HL7) version 3 to support formal caregivers, both health and social care providers, and informal caregivers in the context of home care services. MethodsA pilot study was set up involving two Portuguese institutions that provide home care services for the elderly. Defining of information requirements was performed according to a comprehensive process. This included a review of the literature, observations of work activities, interviews with caregivers, care receivers and their relatives, analysis of paper documentation related to care receivers’ histories, health conditions and care plans, and brainstorming groups involving specialized professionals. Following this, information objects were implemented and validated. ResultsThe methodological approach, as well as the information persistence services, proved to be robust and adequate to specify, implement, and validate different types of information objects related to home care services for the elderly. This study also reinforces the application of the RIM of the HL7 version 3 beyond the strict scope of health care, allowing the persistence of not only health care information, but also information related to social assistance activities. ConclusionsThis study contributes to the ongoing efforts related to the development of eHealth applications to improve the cooperation among formal health care and social caregivers, as well as care receivers and their informal caregivers.

Health and social care systems currently face with a set of challenges that requires integrated approaches. Integrated care comprises formal care networks, both health care and social care, and informal care networks resulting from a diversity of community-oriented structures (e.g. relatives, friends or voluntary groups). This paper presents an information persistence architecture designed to support the development of information services specially focused on informal care providers. Informal care is inherently slightly structured and, consequently, imposes high demanding requirements related with the flexibility and interoperability of the information persistence.

Health and social care systems are currently facing complex challenges that continually require more sophisticated answers. The integration of health, social and informal care and the care personalization are important issues in the organization of existing health and social systems. For that information architectures are required to accommodate a wide range of information objects. The paper presents an architecture that follows an open management information paradigm, where the knowledge model adjusts the information model to the requirements of each specific domain application. This can contribute to the integration of health and social care information records with Ambient Assisted Living and user generated information.

This paper presents a platform to support the development of services and applications for informal and formal care, which is based on the principles of the Services Oriented Architecture. In particular, the paper presents the mechanisms that allow the developers a significant freedom to implement and use new types of information objects.