Ravi Raman

A production system for intelligent monitoring systems

Conventional monitoring systems use data-collection techniques to obtain sensor data about various aspects of hazardous workplaces such as coal mines and provide warnings. However, they are ill-equipped for making complex decisions involving large amounts of interrelated data. Laser/RPS, a C language-based object-oriented production system, is presented, and those programming system features that can be used to develop intelligent monitoring systems are described. Potential applications of this system to underground coal mine monitoring systems are discussed. >

Empowering mobile healthcare providers via a patient benefits authorization service

Moving rapidly between patient examining rooms, physicians have to examine, diagnose and decide on a course of treatment appropriate for each patient. However, if the patients health plan administrators subsequently deny coverage, the prescribed treatments would then have to be changed. There are a wide range of health insurance plans and varying cost curtailment procedures. Physicians are therefore ill-equipped to determine a course of treatment that addresses the patients needs and complies with the payers regulations. Benefits authorization applications on handheld devices using wireless communications can help mobile healthcare providers quickly determine patient medical benefit eligibility. Such facilities could improve the quality of care and physician patient communications, prevent denial of services by health plan administrators and consequential expenses to the patient. The authors originally developed a prototype desktop application as part of a secure telemedicine research project. They identify enhancements to this work to address interoperability issues and support the needs of mobile healthcare providers.

Secure collaboration technology for healthcare enterprises

Healthcare organizations have a legacy of relatively isolated vendor-proprietary departmental systems. The cost of integrating disparate healthcare systems is a significant barrier to collaborative endeavors such as telemedicine. Recent legislative measures for the protection of healthcare information place significant responsibilities on healthcare organizations to ensure that their healthcare systems and information technology practices adequately protect the privacy of healthcare information in their charge. The authors, who are developing secure telemedicine applications, identify some of these hurdles and discuss their approach to enable healthcare organizations to engage in collaborative healthcare activities.

Collaboration framework for nomadic healthcare providers

Collaboration among nomadic healthcare providers presents unique challenges. This paper describes a set of requirements and an implementation approach for a collaboration architecture to meet these challenges. The collaboration framework consists of a set of services and client applications that provide authentication, messaging, scheduling, decision support and workflow.

Functional specifications for collaboration services

Describes an attempt at specifying a generic and reusable set of services for computer-supported collaboration among teams engaged in any collaborative process within a distributed organization or group of organizations. The services are cataloged under the headings: information management, group communications, group management, process management, and infrastructure support.<<ETX>>

An Expert System Design for Ventilation, Emergency Rescue, and Power Peak Shaving

The development of a rudimentary expert system design for routine and fire-driven mine ventilation, emergency escape and rescue planning, and peak power shaving is described. This description is of the first efforts toward an intelligent mine management system. Various knowledge-base constructs have been used for data validation with an interface to a standard mine fire simulation program. A natural language interface was developed to the system including the ventilation simulator program. This system serves as a vehicle for testing hypotheses generated by an expert systems.