D. Papakonstantinou

Using ontology-based knowledge networks for user training in managing healthcare processes

The cooperative and collaborative nature of healthcare delivery requires active user participation in healthcare process design/redesign. Hence, there is a need to provide users with reusable, flexible, agile and adaptable training material in order to enable them instil their knowledge and expertise in healthcare process modelling and automation activities. This paper presents a prototype approach for designing user training material which is based on externalising domain knowledge in the form of ontology-based knowledge networks. The approach provides significant advantages to both designers (knowledge-content reusability and Semantic Web enabling) and users (semantic search, knowledge navigation and knowledge dissemination).

Using ESB and BPEL for Evolving Healthcare Systems Towards Pervasive, Grid-Enabled SOA

Healthcare organizations often face the challenge of integrating diverse and geographically disparate information technology systems to respond to changing requirements and to exploit the capabilities of modern technologies. Hence, systems evolution, through modification and extension of the existing information technology infrastructure, becomes a necessity. Moreover, the availability of these systems at the point of care when needed is a vital issue for the quality of healthcare provided to patients. This chapter takes a process perspective of healthcare delivery within and across organizational boundaries and presents a disciplined approach for evolving healthcare systems towards a pervasive, grid-enabled service-oriented architecture using the enterprise system bus middleware technology for resolving integration issues, the business process execution language for supporting collaboration requirements and grid middleware technology for both addressing common SOA scalability requirements and complementing existing system functionality. In such an environment, appropriate security mechanisms must ensure authorized access to integrated healthcare services and data. To this end, a security framework addressing security aspects such as authorization and access control is also presented.

A Context-Aware, Capability-Based, Role-Centric Access Control Model for IoMT

The Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) can be described as connecting everyday devices and wearables to the Internet in order to intelligently link them together, thus enabling new forms of communication between things (medical devices) and people (patients) and between things themselves. This paper describes a context-aware access control model that hinges on the role-based and attribute-based access control (RABAC) and the capability-based access control (CapBAC) models. A prototype access control mechanism based on the model is intended to be incorporated into a personal health record (PHR) platform.

A semantic wiki for user training in ePrescribing processes

With the number of prescriptions rising nationally each year, it is required that web-based technology will fully embraced in the pharmacy industry as an aid to quality-assuring prescribing processes. Electronic prescribing (ePrescribing) has the ability not only to streamline the prescription writing process, but also to reduce the number of errors that may be incurred with hand-written prescriptions. The adoption of ePrescribing nationwide through an ePrescribing system premises active participation of users who are familiar with the cooperative and collaborative nature of healthcare delivery. Thus, there is a need for reusable, flexible, agile and adaptable training content with the objective to enable healthcare professionals instill their knowledge and expertise in the ePrescribing process. To this end, social software, such as a wiki, could be used as it supports cooperation and collaboration anytime, anywhere, combined with semantic web technology that enables structuring pieces of information for easy retrieval, reuse and exchange between different systems and tools. In this paper a semantic wiki is presented as a means for developing training material for healthcare providers regarding ePrescribing process. The semantic wiki should act as a collective online memory containing training material that is accessible to authorized users, thus enhancing the training process with collaboration and cooperation capabilities. It is proposed that the wiki is stored in a secure virtual private cloud that is accessible from anywhere, be it an excessively open environment, while meeting the requirements of redundancy, high performance and autoscaling.