Flora Malamateniou

Ubiquitous access to cloud emergency medical services

Recently, there has been a remarkable upsurge in activity surrounding the adoption of Personal Health Records (PHRs). Since PHRs contain global patient information and not certain pieces collected by individual healthcare providers, they can be used as basic infrastructures for building and operating several important systems for both healthcare and the tax payers. Emergency medical systems (EMS) are among the most crucial ones as they involve a variety of activities which are performed from the time of a call to an ambulance service till the time of patients discharge from the emergency department of a hospital and are closely interrelated so that collaboration and coordination becomes a vital issue for patients and for emergency healthcare service performance. This paper is concerned with the development of a PHR-based EMS in a cloud computing environment. Cloud-based services can prove important in emergency care delivery since they can enable easy and immediate access to patient data from anywhere and via almost any device.

Developing a virtual patient record using XML and web-based workflow technologies

Virtual patient records (VPR) provide a means for integrated access to patient information that may be scattered around different healthcare settings. Within the boundaries of a health district providing all levels of care, this concept can be implemented in a corporate Intranet environment to support longitudinal patient care activities across the participating healthcare providers. In this context, a VPR implementation enables autonomous healthcare providers to operate in a cooperative working environment and apply continuity of care. Workflow systems bring this collaboration and cooperation into effect by automatically routing the medical information needed by authorized actors in a healthcare process. This paper presents a VPR framework that allows integrating geographically dispersed medical information within a health district and enhancing collaboration and coordination of authorized workgroups by means of a web-based workflow system. An implementation of the proposed framework is also presented.

Emergency Healthcare Process Automation Using Mobile Computing and Cloud Services

Emergency care is basically concerned with the provision of pre-hospital and in-hospital medical and/or paramedical services and it typically involves a wide variety of interdependent and distributed activities that can be interconnected to form emergency care processes within and between Emergency Medical Service (EMS) agencies and hospitals. Hence, in developing an information system for emergency care processes, it is essential to support individual process activities and to satisfy collaboration and coordination needs by providing readily access to patient and operational information regardless of location and time. Filling this information gap by enabling the provision of the right information, to the right people, at the right time fosters new challenges, including the specification of a common information format, the interoperability among heterogeneous institutional information systems or the development of new, ubiquitous trans-institutional systems. This paper is concerned with the development of an integrated computer support to emergency care processes by evolving and cross-linking institutional healthcare systems. To this end, an integrated EMS cloud-based architecture has been developed that allows authorized users to access emergency case information in standardized document form, as proposed by the Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE) profile, uses the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) standard Emergency Data Exchange Language (EDXL) Hospital Availability Exchange (HAVE) for exchanging operational data with hospitals and incorporates an intelligent module that supports triaging and selecting the most appropriate ambulances and hospitals for each case.

Enabling data protection through PKI encryption in IoT m-Health devices

Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) aims at providing unobtrusive support to frail and elderly people for their daily life based on their context and situation. To this end, systems and services are required which are user-centric and adaptable towards the needs and capabilities of the people in need of care. The continuous integration of leading-edge technologies, such as cloud and wireless communication technologies, in the context of the Internet of the Things (IoT), can meet this requirement by enabling a new form of communication between frail and elderly people, their environment and relevant groups of care givers. However, for IoT-based systems to reach their full potential, sound answers need to be provided to the important security questions arisen, particularly those regarding authentication of entities (people and environmental objects) and data privacy. This paper presents a system based on Gateways (GW) that aggregate health sensor data and resolve security issues through digital certificates and PKI data encryption.

Specifying Workflow Process Requirements for an Emergency Medical Service

Recent trends in healthcare delivery have led to a gradual shift in the conceptualisation of healthcare information systems towards supporting healthcare processes in a more direct way. The move towards integrated and managed care, which requires designing healthcare processes around patient needs and incorporating efficiency considerations, has led to an increased interest in process-oriented healthcare information systems based on workflow technology. This means to actively deliver the tasks to be performed to the right persons at the right time with the necessary information and the application functions needed. Moreover, workflow technology promotes a component-oriented development whereby the process logic is separated from application logic. This paper presents an approach to capturing process logic requirements for healthcare workflow systems with a view to design a system that is easily adjustable to process changes and to evolving organizational structures at a reasonable cost.

A workflow-based approach to virtual patient record security

Virtual patient records provide a means for integrated access to patient information that may be scattered around different healthcare organizations (or hospital departments). As Intranets provide, among others, secure access to medical information, they constitute an appropriate technological infrastructure for a virtual patient record implementation. In such cases, a security policy can be enforced by combining the security features of the Intranet with the security features of the intraorganizational systems. However, when a workflow system is implemented to automate interorganizational healthcare processes, an additional security layer is needed. An authorization architecture that serves this purpose is presented in this paper.

An Android-Enabled Mobile Framework for Ubiquitous Access to Cloud Emergency Medical Services

Recently, there has been a remarkable upsurge in activity surrounding the adoption of Personal Health Records (PHRs). Since PHRs contain global patient information and not certain pieces collected by individual healthcare providers, they can be used as basic infrastructures for building and operating several important systems for both healthcare and the tax payers. Emergency medical systems (EMS) are among the most crucial ones as they involve a variety of activities which are performed from the time of a call to an ambulance service till the time of patients discharge from the emergency department of a hospital and are closely interrelated so that collaboration and coordination becomes a vital issue for patients and for emergency healthcare service performance. The integration of leading-edge technologies, such as cloud-based services and mobile technology, with Personal Health Records (PHRs) can prove important in emergency care delivery as it can facilitate authorized access to comprehensive and unified health information at any point of care or decision making through familiar environments such as Googles Android. This paper is concerned with the development of a PHR-based EMS in a cloud computing environment. The proposed EMS is accessible by Android-enabled mobile devices and incorporates a customized asynchronous notification feature whereby caregivers are notified on critical data updates in a way that efficient utilization of mobile device resources is achieved. This feature draws upon a cloud-based push messaging mechanism, namely Google Cloud Messaging, a lightweight mechanism which enables servers to communicate asynchronously with mobile applications running on Android Operating System.

A search engine for virtual patient records.

Virtual patient records provide a means for integrated access to patient information that may be scattered around different healthcare settings. Within the boundaries of a health district providing all levels of care, this concept can be implemented in an Intranet environment to support longitudinal patient care activities across the participating healthcare providers. Since medical information is stored on multiple Intranet sites in various forms (e.g. codified data, transcribed documents, and images), a suite of appropriate tools is needed to enable access to such information in combined form. In most cases, however, access to medical information should be restricted to authorized users. To serve this purpose, a prototype search engine incorporating an authorization and access control functionality has been developed and presented in this paper. The system is based on the signature file access method and an experimental implementation written in JAVA is also described.

E-EPR: a cloud-based architecture of an electronic emergency patient record

Limited access to past medical information of emergency cases during emergency healthcare delivery is a proximal cause of increasing emergency care length and risk. Hence, there is a need for ubiquitous access to integrated emergency patient information at the point of care in order to effectively and efficiently manage emergency cases and to apply the appropriate diagnosis and treatment procedures. In this paper, a cloud-based service-oriented architecture (SOA) is described for the implementation of an electronic emergency patient record system (E-EPR) that provide functionality for managing (retrieving, transforming, exchanging and storing) emergency case information and patient critical medical information in a distributed and ubiquitous manner that supports several platforms and applications. The proposed system can be easily integrated with existing ambulance service and hospital information systems because of the use of open-wide standards. An experimental implementation of the system in a simulated laboratory environment is presented.

A system for the provision of medical diagnostic and treatment advice in home care environment

Healthcare is an increasingly collaborative enterprise, involving broad range of healthcare services provided by many individuals and organizations. Apart from the provision of healthcare services to patients during hospitalization, the ability to assist people who have healthcare needs at their homes (e.g., the elderly) has become an increasingly critical issue. Provision of such personalized medical care services to patients requires readily access to integrated healthcare services ubiquitously. The integration of mobile and wireless devices with Grid technology can provide ubiquitous and pervasive access to Grid services. This article presents MASPortal, a Grid portal application for the assistance of people who are in need of medical advice at their homes. MASPortal is designed for use with wireless Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) and provides remote access to an automated medical diagnostic and treatment advice system via an adaptive and easy to use interface. MASPortal has been implemented with a multi-layered security infrastructure in order to ensure secure access to healthcare processes and sensitive patient data.