Shelly Sachdeva

Semantic interoperability in standardized electronic health record databases

Different clinics and hospitals have their own information systems to maintain patient data. This hinders the exchange of data among systems (and organizations). Hence there is a need to provide standards for data exchange. In digitized form, the individual patients medical record can be stored, retrieved, and shared over a network through enhancement in information technology. Thus, electronic health records (EHRs) should be standardized, incorporating semantic interoperability. A subsequent step requires that healthcare professionals and patients get involved in using the EHRs, with the help of technological developments. This study aims to provide different approaches in understanding some current and challenging concepts in health informatics. Successful handling of these challenges will lead to improved quality in healthcare by reducing medical errors, decreasing costs, and enhancing patient care. The study is focused on the following goals: (1) understanding the role of EHRs; (2) understanding the need for standardization to improve quality; (3) establishing interoperability in maintaining EHRs; (4) examining a framework for standardization and interoperability (the openEHR architecture; (5) identifying the role of archetypes for knowledge-based systems; and (6) understanding the difficulties in querying HER data.

A brief survey: Usability in healthcare

Improvements in usability are essential for the health care industry. Preventing errors, improving efficiency, and making the systems easier to learn is a tall order for this domain. These systems fail because of loss of productivity and steep learning curves. The study presents a brief survey of usability. It examines the importance of usability according to some of the recent trends in domain. It provides an analysis according to various parameters among those trends. It proposes some features to have an appealing and responsive user interface that provides a rich overview of data. The aim of the study is to help in improving the health care quality and performance by building adaptive user interfaces.

Applying data mining techniques to standardized electronic health records for decision support

Data Mining is very popular in todays era because it provides access to the information that is hidden from a normal human being eye. The hidden information that is made available through data mining can benefit the person involved by providing an efficient decision support. Today data mining can be applied to various areas such as marketing, banking, aerospace and healthcare. It is identified that providing decision support in healthcare domain can help in saving human life. Although providing decision support through data mining in healthcare is very beneficial but it lacks standardization. A comparison of benefits gained from applying data mining techniques to standardized and non-standardized EHRs is provided. This paper aims to indentify the need of applying data mining techniques to standardized electronic healthcare records. It interrogates various issues that need to be resolved for providing an efficient standardized decision support system.

Semantic interoperability in healthcare information for EHR databases

Healthcare information is complex, distributed and non-structured in nature. Integration of information is important to retrieve patient history, for knowledge sharing and to formulate queries. Large scale adoption of electronic healthcare applications requires semantic interoperability. Interoperability of Electronic Health Records (EHRs) is important because patients have become mobile, treatment and health care providers have increased, and also, have become more specialized. The paper analyses the role of semantic interoperability in healthcare. The system modeling approach has been analyzed with a view of supporting system-to-system and user-system interactions. In addition, query interfaces have been considered at varying levels of user and system activities.

Mining Standardized Semantic Interoperable Electronic Healthcare Records

There is vast potential for data mining applications in healthcare. Generally, these applications can be grouped as the evaluation of treatment effectiveness; management of healthcare; customer relationship management; and detection of fraud and abuse. To build the knowledge that is universally true, data has to be collected from all over the world. Collecting such large amount of data to prepare a single database that can be used to apply data mining techniques requires many challenges to be faced by the researcher. Till date no standard is adopted universally that imposes some guidelines on storing the data in a particular format. We propose to use a generic database to collect standardized EHR data that is available in different formats and at different geographical regions. This paper proposes a framework for applying data mining techniques to healthcare database stored on the basis of row model. We also try to incorporate protective measures in the architecture for privacy of the user, try to secure the data collected from various sources and also use of authentication mechanism at interface level.

Performance comparison for data storage - Db4o and MySQL databases

Choice of right and appropriate database is always crucial for any information system. Since database is an integral and important part, we choose to write the performance analysis of different type of databases in context to health care data. Health care database consists of Electronic Health Records. Also, various Electronic Health Record standards like HL7, openEHR and CEN EN 13606 have been defined for relational, object and object-relational databases. So far, none of the standard has been defined using object-database. In order to do so, we must compare and analyze the performance of object-database over others. In this paper, firstly we have studied the current trends in Indian Health Care with respect to medical data storage and retrieval. Next, we have compared the performance of MySQL (relational) and Db4o (object) database in terms of persistence time and storage space for a sample hospital data of 100 users.

Implementing security technique on generic database

Database maintenance has become an important issue in todays world. Addition or alteration of any field to an existing database schema cost high to a corporation. Whenever new data types are introduced or existing types are modified in a conventional relational database system, the physical design of the database must be changed accordingly. For this reason, it is desirable that a database should be flexible and allow for modification and addition of new types of data without having to change the physical database schema. The generic model is designed to allow a wide variety of data to be accommodated in a general purpose set of data structures. This generic mechanism for data storage has been used in various information systems such as banking, defense, e-commerce and especially healthcare domain. But, addressing security on generic databases is a challenging task. To the best of our knowledge, applying security on generic database has not been addressed yet. Various cryptographic security techniques, such as hashing algorithms, public and private key algorithms, have already been applied on a database. In this paper, we are proposing an extra layer of security to the existing databases, through Negative Database technique. The advantages of the negative database approach on generic database has been demonstrated and emphasized. Correspondingly, the complexity of the proposed algorithm has been computed.

Elections Again, Twitter May Help!!! A Large Scale Study for Predicting Election Results Using Twitter

With the widespread acceptability of social media and networking sites, more and more people are coming forward to express their views and opinion about multidisciplinary topics. Nevertheless, people do talk about politics and politicians on these sites enabling us to explore the opportunity of monitoring and mining the opinions of large number of politically active population in real time. In this paper, we have tried to analyze a very famous micro-blogging online social network Twitter, where users read and write millions of short messages known as tweets on a variety of topics every day. We conducted the content analysis of over 0.25 million tweets containing a reference to either a political party or a politician for election which were being conducted in April 2014 in India. Our analysis for tweets indicated a very close connection to the parties and political position of politicians thus, can conceivably imitate the offline landscape of the elections. Finally, we discuss the use of micro-blogging message content as a legitimate pointer of political sentiments and develop suggestions for the future research.

Information interchange services for electronic health record databases

Healthcare information is complex and distributed in nature. Patient care and a health condition commonly require collaboration between several clinicians. Such an integration of information is important to retrieve patient history, for knowledge sharing and to formulate queries. Large scale adoption of electronic healthcare applications requires semantic interoperability because patients have become mobile, treatment and healthcare providers have increased, and also, have become more specialised. Similar to the web, information retrieval is key feature of these end-user systems. The paper analyses the role of semantic interoperability in various cross-organisational business processes in healthcare domain. The system modelling approach has been analysed with a view of supporting system-to-system and user-system interactions. The paper presents a comparison of the existing information and querying methods and studies their applicability to the dual-level electronic health records (EHRs) systems. It further discusses the best approach to build a user-friendly querying interface for these systems.

Applying cloud computing model in PHR architecture

In recent years, some practical and commercial Personal Health Records and some related services such as Google Health [1] and Microsoft HealthVault [2] have been launched. On the other hand, Cloud Computing has matured more and become the major streams to realize a more effective operational environment. However so far, there have been few studies in regards to applying Cloud architecture in the PHR explicitly despite generating volume data. In this paper, we review our trial on the general architecture design by applying the Cloud components for supporting healthcare record areas and clarify the required conditions to realize it.