Carlos Chirivella Moreno; Ignacio Bermejo Bosch(**); David Garrido Jaén; José Montero Vilela; Javier Andrade Celdrán; Javier Sánchez Lacuesta(**); Helios de Rosario Martínez(**); José Mª Baydal Bertomeu

Instituto de Biomecánica (IBV). Universitat Politècnica de València. Edificio 9C. Camino de Vera s/n (46022) Valencia. Spain.
(**) IBV’s Healhcare Technology Group, CIBER in Bioengineering, Biomaterials and Nanomedicine (CIBER-BBN)

The Instituto de Biomecánica (IBV) has developed an application to centrally manage all the patients and sessions of the biomechanical assessment laboratory. This application has become the door to all the other applications of this laboratory, which makes it possible to share and access patient information and sessions without having to be physically in the laboratory. It even allows users to access results and reports without having the assessment applications installed on their PC. In addition, the application is adapted to the Organic Law on Personal Data Protection and centrally manages its compliance.

INTRODUCTION

More than 15 years ago, the Instituto de Biomecánica (IBV) began developing assessment applications that eventually formed the biomechanical assessment laboratory; each of those applications had an independent system to manage patients and a file system of their own to store the assessments and their results.

In order to facilitate access and utilization of the information generated by the biomechanical units, the IBV has developed the application Laboratory of Biomechanical Assessment, which implements a single patient manager that communicates with the assessment tools and stores reports and results in a database. This database can be installed on a network, which allows different facilities (various offices and laboratories) to share it. 

DESCRIPTION

The Laboratory of Biomechanical Assessment application (Figure 1) centrally manages patients and assessment sessions. This software, designed to optimize the use of the activity developed by a biomechanical unit, communicates with the laboratory applications in order to create assessment sessions, display them and generate reports. It also centralizes the management required to comply with the Data Protection Law, which avoids repeating this management for each application of laboratory assessment.

Figure 1. Display screen of Laboratory of Biomechanical Assessment

In addition, it collects these reports together with the results of the assessment, and stores them in the patient database, so that it is possible to access them without having the relevant assessment application. This management software becomes the only door to use any assessment applications installed in the laboratory equipment: NedAMH/IBV, NedSVE/IBV, NedLumbar/IBV, NedCervical/IBV, NedHombro/IBV, NedRodilla/IBV, NedMano/IBV, NedDiscapacidad/IBV, NedRangos/IBV or TestFRPLumbar. Assessment applications are still responsible for creating, calculating and displaying the assessments, but now they return the results and the reports to the new Laboratory of Biomechanical Assessment application for it to store them in the database and share them with other users.

In addition, the software for centralized management makes it possible to store additional information on patients, thus completing their sheet with reports and complementary clinical tests relevant to the assessment team. This utility is also available at the assessment session level, since each of them can store images, reports and any additional tests that the evaluator deems necessary.

The main window of the application (Figure 2) shows the list of patients and the assessment sessions as a central element. For ease of use, this list is structured as a tree where patients are first level elements from which the sessions hang down as second level elements. This way, it is very easy to see which assessment sessions were performed on a particular patient, when they were performed, what type of assessment it is, and the results obtained.

Figure 2. Main screen of Laboratory of Biomechanical Assessment

Additionally, the software has a quick search tool, whose search terms filter the list of patients and sessions. This way, only those results that match the search criterion are shown (Figure 3).

Figure 3. Example of patient search

Several icons included on the list facilitate access to the most usual operations regarding patients and sessions. The patient rows offer the following functions:

 Add assessment session: As shown in figure 4, clicking this option opens a context menu with the laboratory applications in order to insert a new session of the desired application.

Figure 4. Adding a patient assessment session

  Additional documents of the patient: This option allows the user to manage complementary documents related to each patient.

The following functions are included on the session rows:

  See assessment session: Clicking this option opens the selected session with the appropriate laboratory application.

  See reports: This option gives access to the reports of the selected assessment session. These reports can be viewed without having the relevant assessment application installed. In addition to the assessment reports generated by the laboratory applications, documents related to the assessment that are external to the laboratory can be manually added.

  See session results: This option shows the most important results of the selected assessment session, even though you do not have the appropriate laboratory application installed.

CONCLUSIONS

The Laboratory of Biomechanical Assessment application unifies the use of assessment tools and centralizes the management of patients. The following features of the centralized management software are particularly noticeable:

1. All the assessment applications share the patient base, which eliminates the separate management of them and the subsequent repetition of data sheets.
2. There is a single point of entry, the Laboratory of Biomechanical Assessment, which will call up the assessment applications as needed: the user has no longer to look for the application required.
3. The information is included in a shared database, which makes it possible to access it from different locations and, for instance, register it in a laboratory, study and analyze it in an office, and review the results and reports at a doctor’s practice. Similarly, more than one laboratory can work with the same database.
4. It is possible to access patient information, sessions, results and assessment reports without having any assessment applications installed, only by using the Laboratory of Biomechanical Assessment.
5. The database has a simple structure and can be consulted by other systems, which facilitates integration with the information systems used by users.
6. The Laboratory of Biomechanical Assessment is adapted to the Organic Law on Personal Data Protection and makes it easier to comply with it.