Communication is a crucial element of the anamnesis and proper diagnosis of the patient. Miscommunication cases happen each day, in every hospital, internationally and it is responsible for missed diagnosis and increasing amount of medical errors.
Medical staff deal on everyday bases with patients speaking different languages, patient with communication difficulties, deaf patients, patients with neurological deficits, patients unable to speak or express their problem.
In order to solve the problem of miscommunication and do not exclude any of the mentioned above groups we want to develop the Health Communication Assistance system.
The Health Communication Assistance is a highly innovative software system based both on simple, universally understood iconographies associated with their description in language chosen by the patient with a double support system for the communication between patient and medical staff.
The software will allow to obtain all the needed information starting from the most general to most specific questions about the cause of sanitary assistance request. Finally, the software will create a detailed report of all the questions and answers that has been asked and given during the anamnesis process.
The innovativeness of the system lies in the fact that it is based on over 100 universally understood iconographies provided for every question and answer that must be presented during the anamnesis process.
The system will be developed in the web form, accessible through URL and visualized perfectly by computers, mobile phones and tablets.
The project will be realized with the last released versions of PHO, MySQL and Javascript and the development will be performed using the programming paradigm OOP (Object-oriented programming) and the method HMVC (Hierarchical-Model-View-Control).
After the development, the system will be tested on 100 non-italian speakers patients of the Translational and Precision Medicine (in-patients and out-patients).
The Health Communication Assistance is an innovative project which will be able to be used both nationally and internationally, because the problem of miscommunication is worldwide. The software system will be excellent to be used in Emergency units, First aid stations, Ambulance services, General Practitioner offices, Specialistic hospitals. It will be available for doctors, surgeons, ambulance service workers, general practitioners, nurses and paramedics.
The proposed software system will improve communication between medical staff and the patient. By this it will decrease misdiagnosis, morbidity and mortality associated to miscommunication. It will decrease the fear of the patient, avoid violence and aggression against medical staff. It will finally decrease legacy problems by giving the possibility of availability of the records of the patients anamnesis.