Assisting Older Adults with Transitions of Care

University of Colorado at Denver and Health Sciences Center

Stephen Eisenhard Ross, M.D.
Division of General Internal Medicine
University of Colorado at Denver and Health Sciences Center, Aurora, CO
Team Biographies

What Was Accomplished

The team at the University of Colorado at Denver and Health Sciences Center developed a portable touch-screen computer that older patients or their caregivers can receive upon hospital discharge. The tablet-sized PC helped patients track and organize medications, allowing them to coordinate their medication lists with their doctors. Additional applications assist in scheduling prescriptions, ordering refills, preparing for visits and more. The team seeks to push the boundaries in ambient computing by older adults and, using embedded information (barcodes) in generating medication lists. They also worked to establish a semantic link between the medication list and an authoritative source of information such as Medline Plus. The team prototyped the application through rapid iteration testing and evaluation (RITE) methods, using tools such as storyboarding, paper testing of key features such as the tablet and scanner, and medication reconciliation and scheduling. Working with Bent LLC., the Colorado and Vanderbilt teams built a shared medication list and tested it in different applications. Included in the working model of a Common Platform for medication management are the medication list, scheduling, documentation, reminder and alert functions. The team contracted with Thomson Healthcare for standardized patient medication information.

• Background Information
• Project Poster

Work Products
To download any of these documents, view the Work Products Table.

• Overview of the Project - Data source model, and a description of all the files included in the source code file
  
  
• Design Proposal - Includes Statement of User Needs, Design Outline, and Prototype Architecture
  
  
• Source Code - Code for the Colorado Care Tablet components developed by the Colorado Team and components developed by Bent, Inc., and database schemas
  
  
• PowerPoint Summary of Colorado Care Tablet - June, 2008
  
  
• Paper - "Challenges in Evaluating Three Assistive Health Applications," CHI 2009 Workshop: Evaluating New Interactions in Healthcare: Challenges and Approaches."
  
  
• Poster - "Colorado Care Tablet: Designing a Personal Health Record for Older Adults"