A New Healthcare Context Information: The Social Context

During the treatment process, medical institutes collect context information about their patients and store it in their healthcare systems. The collected information describes the measurable, risk, or medication information and used to improve the performance of the institutes healthcare systems by allowing diverse knowledge about patients. Being said that some other information is needed as they influence patients’ life style such as education and income as the high level of education or income reflected positively to the patient’s life, and probably resulting in reducing likelihood disease or incidence of infectious diseases. In this paper, a new type of healthcare context information (Social Context) is proposed to address this need. It can be divided into four main categories: related people, behavior, income and education of the patient. We believe that the new proposed context information should be considered in the designing process of the context-aware medical informatics systems beside to the well-known context information.