Samir El-Masri

An Emergency System to Improve Ambulance Dispatching, Ambulance Diversion and Clinical Handover Communication--A Proposed Model

Effective communication in healthcare is important and especially critical in emergency situations. In this paper we propose a new comprehensive emergency system which facilitates the communication process in emergency cases from ambulance dispatch to the patient’s arrival and handover in the hospital. The proposed system has been designed to facilitate and computerize all the processes involved in an accident from finding the nearest ambulance through to accessing a patient’s online health record which can assist in pre-hospital treatments. The proposed system also locates the nearest hospital specializing in the patient’s condition and will communicate patient identification to the emergency department. The components of the proposed system and the technologies used in building this system are outlined in this paper as well as the challenges expected and proposed solutions to these challenges.

An Ontological Case Base Engineering Methodology for Diabetes Management

Ontology engineering covers issues related to ontology development and use. In Case Based Reasoning (CBR) system, ontology plays two main roles; the first as case base and the second as domain ontology. However, the ontology engineering literature does not provide adequate guidance on how to build, evaluate, and maintain ontologies. This paper proposes an ontology engineering methodology to generate case bases in the medical domain. It mainly focuses on the research of case representation in the form of ontology to support the case semantic retrieval and enhance all knowledge intensive CBR processes. A case study on diabetes diagnosis case base will be provided to evaluate the proposed methodology.

A Novel System Architecture for the National Integration of Electronic Health Records: A Semi-Centralized Approach

The goal of a national electronic health records integration system is to aggregate electronic health records concerning a particular patient at different healthcare providers’ systems to provide a complete medical history of the patient. It holds the promise to address the two most crucial challenges to the healthcare systems: improving healthcare quality and controlling costs. Typical approaches for the national integration of electronic health records are a centralized architecture and a distributed architecture. This paper proposes a new approach for the national integration of electronic health records, the semi-centralized approach, an intermediate solution between the centralized architecture and the distributed architecture that has the benefits of both approaches. The semi-centralized approach is provided with a clearly defined architecture. The main data elements needed by the system are defined and the main system modules that are necessary to achieve an effective and efficient functionality of the system are designed. Best practices and essential requirements are central to the evolution of the proposed architecture. The proposed architecture will provide the basis for designing the simplest and the most effective systems to integrate electronic health records on a nation-wide basis that maintain integrity and consistency across locations, time and systems, and that meet the challenges of interoperability, security, privacy, maintainability, mobility, availability, scalability, and load balancing.

HL7 Engine Module for Healthcare Information Systems

The integration of applications is always the most important issue for a development team especially in the healthcare industry. In this paper, a Health Level 7 (HL7) engine system is proposed to solve HL7 challenges, which are associated with applying HL7 in healthcare organizations. This new HL7 engine has been implemented in a hospital as a solution for challenges we have faced. The engine shows great success overcoming known HL7 limitations.

Ontology based clinical decision support system for diabetes diagnostic

This paper presents a diagnosis and treatment recommendation system for diabetes. The system considers patient information, symptoms and signs, risk factors and lab tests and suggests a treatment plan according to the diabetes type as recommended by the Clinical Practice Guidelines (CPG). The work consisted in the acquisition, modeling and implementation of diabetes domain expertise from experts, the CPG and other sources to develop a domain ontology and a decision support system to handle the diabetes in an early stage. The proposed system uses an ontology to allow a standard representation of domain concepts and relationships and enable clinical knowledge sharing, update and reuse. The proposed ontology is designed and developed by OWL-DL, the rules are constructed by the Semantic Web Rule Language (SWRL) and executed by JESS inference engine.

Mobile Emergency System and Integration

A new advanced medical emergency system has been proposed and designed to facilitate and computerize all the processes involved in an emergency. The proposed system contacts the ambulance emergency system, locates the correct and nearest available ambulance, accesses a Smart Online Electronic Health Record (SOEHR) that can critically assist in pre-hospital treatments, and identifies availability of the nearest available specialized hospital all through communication with the Hospital Emergency Department System (HEDS) which provides early and continuous information about the incoming patient to the hospital. Emerging and advanced technologies such as mobile web services, SOA, SOAP, HL7 and GPS have been extensively used to design, develop and integrate all system components.

Content management systems and E-commerce: a comparative case study

The need for CMSs to create and edit e-commerce websites has increased with the growing importance of e-commerce. In this paper, the various features essential for e-commerce CMSs are explored. The aim of the paper was to find the best CMS solution for e-commerce which includes the best of both CMS and store management. Accordingly, we conducted a study on three popular open source CMSs for e-commerce: VirtueMart from Joomla!, Ubercart from Drupal, and Magento. We took into account features like hosting and installation, performance, support/community, content management, add on modules and functional features. We concluded with improvements that could be made in order to alleviate problems.

Web Content Management System for Schools

The Content Management System (CMS) changes the perspective towards the web design process through allowing easily nontechnical users to manage contents of their web sites. It has a wide range of features that will satisfy the school communication needs that are well served by dynamic web sites. Consequently, the main goal of this work is designing an appropriate framework for the School Content Management System (SCMS). This system adopts CMS features for creating, editing, organizing, and publishing content relating to different schools’ activities. These activities include school administrative works, course management, and classroom management.