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that: if we really allocate cluster geographically,
what will we do with the following future
migrations within or without the major primary
cluster. It’s expected that families that today live in
one cluster may move to another or outside the
major one. Moving outside all clusters can be easily
addressed, but moving within different cluster can
be difficult.
Reality and legal environment shows that
moving people from one physician to another is
hard due to the lack of professionals. Also, in the
beginning we are geographically dividing clusters
of people in the assumption that it’s better for work
practice and for patient health. Changing the rules
in the future destroys all of the primary purposes.
Another very common problem can be the
constant cycle of in and out of health professionals
(hiring, retiring, etc.). If we make a geographical
cluster with all of its population, but in the same
area there are other patients that have different
Family Health Teams. In the beginning they’re not
considered to enter the cluster, but they actually live
within its area. If the Team of the second groups
moves away, a group of people emerges within an
already full formed cluster. What to do? Have they
not the same right as the other to belong in an
existing formed cluster? Does the team have to
enlarge its number limits and endanger healthcare
quality? Have we the right to destroy a full formed
and functional cluster? These are all questions
rather difficult to answer.
5.4 GeoPrimaryHealth Suitability
Taking in consideration that the manual method
used took 6 months and that with the help of the
system developed time spent was only hours, its’
suitability and advantage is significant. Of course,
this is only due to the fact that polluted data was no
longer present and a correct coordinate could be
extracted without a doubt from patient addresses.
This means that is still much to do in order to clean
databases and obtain a reliable source of
information.
6 CONCLUSIONS
After the completion of this work, we can conclude
that the system developed, can help patient
allocation and that represents a breakthrough in
time-saving. Doing this automatically after the
system is fully developed, took 1 hour in opposition
to months doing it manually.
6.1 Future Work
One of the future work that can be developed is to
follow the Health unit that adopted this distribution
of Patients in order to identify what changes
occurred. Finally, we can also distribute this system
between all Health Units that may need it in order
to verify if this method of distribute patients is
usable in other scenarios (small villages, rural
environments, islands, etc.).
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
To the “ACES Porto Ocidental” for requesting our
help and all the collaboration given. To the unit that
was created for all the help and patience.
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