E-HEALTH SERVICES IN HL7 STANDARD

Abstract: Health care is the diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of disease, illness, injury, and other physical and mental impairments in humans. Health care is delivered by practitioners in medicine, chiropractic, dentistry, nursing, pharmacy, allied health, and other care providers. E-Health tools allow the construction of patientcentric Healthcare Service Providers that aim to support patients to access health related information, to prevent their possible diseases and to monitor their health status. The system builds a profile for each patient and uses it to detect Healthcare Service Providers delivering E-Health services potentially capable of satisfying the patient needs. The proposed system is HL7-aware represents both patient and service information according to the directives of HL7, the information management standard adopted in medical context. Once patients submit a query the proposed system retrieves a set of relevant services which satisfy the need of the patient. However EHealth is evolving into entities such as mobile health which focus on providing healthcare to people anywhere, anytime using broadband and wireless mobile technologies

Modeling the Information Needs of Informal Carers

There is not only a lack of research that conceptualises the information needs of informal carers but also a shortage in research that addresses those needs from the perspective of information systems in the health care system. This shortage of systematic and conceptualised research on information needs of informal carers often prohibits the information providers and developers from knowing what types of information informal carers need to support their roles and tasks as carers and to evaluate how well they are fulfilling the information needs of informal carers. Drawing upon the previous available research on information needs in general and information needs of informal carers in particular, this paper proposes a conceptual model of the information needs of informal carers. The conceptual model illustrates four abstraction groups of information needs of informal carers i.e. recognised demanded, unrecognised demanded, recognised undemanded, and unrecognised undemanded. The paper highlights the potential usefulness of the model

A Theoretical Approach to Information Needs Across Different Healthcare Stakeholders

Abstract. Increased access to medical information can lead to information overload among both the employees in the healthcare sector as well as among healthcare consumers. Moreover, medical information can be hard to understand for consumers who have no prerequisites for interpreting and understanding it. Information systems (e.g. electronic patient records) are normally designed to meet the demands of one professional group, for instance those of physicians. Therefore, the same information in the same form is presented to all the users of the systems regardless of the actual need or prerequisites. The purpose of this article is to illustrate the differences in information needs across different stakeholders in healthcare. A literature review was conducted to collect examples of these different information needs. Based on the findings the role of more user specific information systems is discussed

Health Informatics for Healthcare Quality Improvement: A Literature Review of Issues, Challenges and Findings

Healthcare providers in the United States are facing increasing pressures to provide high quality healthcare at affordable prices, while being compliant with a multitude of complex laws. Recent legal developments have highlighted the role of Information Technology and related systems in providing evidence based healthcare in an efficient manner. Health Informatics has become an integral part of the rapidly advancing healthcare technology scenario, and is emerging as a key resource for healthcare quality improvement in the United States. Considering the rapid pace at which the field of health informatics is advancing, it is important for researchers and the practitioners alike to stay abreast of current literature and developments in the field. This literature review paper captures and summarizes from research literature the most significant issues, challenges and findings pertaining to the field of health informatics with a focus on healthcare quality improvement

Scalable Data Integration for Linked Data

Linked Data describes an extensive set of structured but heterogeneous datasources where entities are connected by formal semantic descriptions. In thevision of the Semantic Web, these semantic links are extended towards theWorld Wide Web to provide as much machine-readable data as possible forsearch queries. The resulting connections allow an automatic evaluation to findnew insights into the data. Identifying these semantic connections betweentwo data sources with automatic approaches is called link discovery. We derivecommon requirements and a generic link discovery workflow based on similaritiesbetween entity properties and associated properties of ontology concepts. Mostof the existing link discovery approaches disregard the fact that in times ofBig Data, an increasing volume of data sources poses new demands on linkdiscovery. In particular, the problem of complex and time-consuming linkdetermination escalates with an increasing number of intersecting data sources.To overcome the restriction of pairwise linking of entities, holistic clusteringapproaches are needed to link equivalent entities of multiple data sources toconstruct integrated knowledge bases. In this context, the focus on efficiencyand scalability is essential. For example, reusing existing links or backgroundinformation can help to avoid redundant calculations. However, when dealingwith multiple data sources, additional data quality problems must also be dealtwith. This dissertation addresses these comprehensive challenges by designingholistic linking and clustering approaches that enable reuse of existing links.Unlike previous systems, we execute the complete data integration workflowvia a distributed processing system. At first, the LinkLion portal will beintroduced to provide existing links for new applications. These links act asa basis for a physical data integration process to create a unified representationfor equivalent entities from many data sources. We then propose a holisticclustering approach to form consolidated clusters for same real-world entitiesfrom many different sources. At the same time, we exploit the semantic typeof entities to improve the quality of the result. The process identifies errorsin existing links and can find numerous additional links. Additionally, theentity clustering has to react to the high dynamics of the data. In particular,this requires scalable approaches for continuously growing data sources withmany entities as well as additional new sources. Previous entity clusteringapproaches are mostly static, focusing on the one-time linking and clustering ofentities from few sources. Therefore, we propose and evaluate new approaches for incremental entity clustering that supports the continuous addition of newentities and data sources. To cope with the ever-increasing number of LinkedData sources, efficient and scalable methods based on distributed processingsystems are required. Thus we propose distributed holistic approaches to linkmany data sources based on a clustering of entities that represent the samereal-world object. The implementation is realized on Apache Flink. In contrastto previous approaches, we utilize efficiency-enhancing optimizations for bothdistributed static and dynamic clustering. An extensive comparative evaluationof the proposed approaches with various distributed clustering strategies showshigh effectiveness for datasets from multiple domains as well as scalability on amulti-machine Apache Flink cluster

An Access Control Model to Facilitate Healthcare Information Access in Context of Team Collaboration

The delivery of healthcare relies on the sharing of patients information among a group of healthcare professionals (so-called multidisciplinary teams (MDTs)). At present, electronic health records (EHRs) are widely utilized system to create, manage and share patient healthcare information among MDTs. While it is necessary to provide healthcare professionals with privileges to access patient health information, providing too many privileges may backfire when healthcare professionals accidentally or intentionally abuse their privileges. Hence, finding a middle ground, where the necessary privileges are provided and malicious usage are avoided, is necessary. This thesis highlights the access control matters in collaborative healthcare domain. Focus is mainly on the collaborative activities that are best accomplished by organized MDTs within or among healthcare organizations with an objective of accomplishing a specific task (patient treatment). Initially, we investigate the importance and challenges of effective MDTs treatment, the sharing of patient healthcare records in healthcare delivery, patient data confidentiality and the need for flexible access of the MDTs corresponding to the requirements to fulfill their duties. Also, we discuss access control requirements in the collaborative environment with respect to EHRs and usage scenario of MDTs collaboration. Additionally, we provide summary of existing access control models along with their pros and cons pertaining to collaborative health systems. Second, we present a detailed description of the proposed access control model. In this model, the MDTs is classified based on Belbin’s team role theory to ensure that privileges are provided to the actual needs of healthcare professionals and to guarantee confidentiality as well as protect the privacy of sensitive patient information. Finally, evaluation indicates that our access control model has a number of advantages including flexibility in terms of permission management, since roles and team roles can be updated without updating privilege for every user. Moreover, the level of fine-grained control of access to patient EHRs that can be authorized to healthcare providers is managed and controlled based on the job required to meet the minimum necessary standard and need-to-know principle. Additionally, the model does not add significant administrative and performance overhead.publishedVersio

Health information dissemination among undergraduate students in Zimbabwe with particular reference to the National University of Science and Technology : a study in developing an integrated framework for health information dissemination

University students in Zimbabwe lack immediate access to accurate health information. There is lack of explicit and integrated structures for disseminating health information to students in Zimbabwe. This inductive study proposes a needs-based, integrated information dissemination framework for promoting health amongst students at the National University and Science and Technology (NUST). The study assessed the health information needs of students and evaluated existing health information dissemination methods at NUST in developing a framework for disseminating health information. The study is informed by the Salutogenetic Theory of health which culminated into an integrated theoretical framework that combines information dissemination and behaviour change theories. A case study strategy was used to gather data within the pragmatic paradigm of grounded constructivism. The population comprised of undergraduate students, the Dean of Students, the Student Counsellor, and the Nursing Sister. Within-method triangulation with complementary data gathering instruments was used to improve reliability of data. Questionnaires, interviews and focus group discussions were used to gather data. A sample of 426 students and 3 members of staff participated in the study. Qualitative and quantitative content analysis was used to determine the confounding factors that informed the design of the framework. The data was supplemented with health information dissemination principles and procedures drawn from literature. The findings reveal that students need health information on a wide range of health topics. Students prefer mobile electronic media, workshops, qualified health professionals, and peers for their health needs. There are significant gaps between the strategies that are being used by NUST to disseminate health information and the health information needs of the students. The university is using traditional information dissemination media and channels that are not in line with the needs of the students. NUST needs to use more interactive and ICT based information dissemination methods. There is also a need for staff recruitment, training and infrastructural development. The proposed framework emphasizes the need for integration of activities, a viable policy, health information literacy training and the use of a mix of persuasion techniques