Abstract:

Introduction:
The Telehealth Brazil Networks Programme is a national action that seeks to improve the quality of care and primary care in the Unified Health System (SUS), integrating teaching and service through information technology tools, which offers conditions to promote Tele-assistance and Tele-education. Regarding to tele-assistance, the Telehealth Center of the University Hospital of the Federal University of Maranhão (NTS HU-UFMA) consists of Teleconsultation services, which provide the assistance for health actions, clinical procedures and issues related to work processes. Over three years (2015-2018), the center had been using the Ministry of Health web platform to have its teleconsultation services offered. Later, to have a better analysis of the processes, the center developed the SMGT, a management and monitoring system to turn all the data into analytical information. But, the integration with these two platforms was still done manually, by daily downloading and uploading a digital spreadsheet to update the database. So, in February of 2018, the center started the development of its own platform, called SOFIA, and launched it in August 2018. The main goal was to have a system environment all dependent on the center (full integration with SGAT and SMGT), improving the analysis of the whole process and developing new features for the better experience of the registered health workers.

Objective:
To develop a full-stack web application capable of handling the teleconsultation services offered by the center. Also, develop an integration between this system with all the platforms developed by the center, creating a full environment for the health workers registered with the NTS HU-UFMA.

Result:
SOFIA has improved the teleconsulation’s flow process with more interactivity and new supporting features during the start, regulation, and answering (including a new way of answering the solicitations faster based on tf-idf algorithms). Also, the development of an integration with SGAT has provided teleducation data about the users, which let to the development of an entire dashboard with the user’s participation overview (participation in teleducation activities, totals of teleconsultations, educational videos, etc). Moreover, a full integration with SMGT has let the update of data be every 15 minutes, which was a great improvement regarding to the previous way (daily update only). Finally, there was an increase of 13.2% in feedback by the registered solicitants on the received answers (98.3% of evaluated teleconsultations).

Conclusion:
SOFIA, in a short time-life, has made a big impact on the offering of teleconsultations services. As long as the development goes, new features are added, increasing the interactivity of the users, automating processes, innovating answering methods, and being an important tool on the qualification of health workers in the state of Maranhão, Brazil.

Keywords:

Telehealth, software development, Brazil.