Effective Use of Personal Health Records to Support Emergency Services

Abstract

Smart City systems capture and exchange information with the aim to improve public services. Particularly, healthcare data could help emergency services to plan resources and make life-saving decisions. However, the delivery of healthcare information to emergency bodies must be balanced against the concerns related to citizens' privacy. Besides, emergency services face challenges in interpreting this data; the heterogeneity of sources and a large amount of information available represent a significant barrier. In this paper, we focus on a case study involving the use of personal health records to support emergency services in the context of a fire building evacuation. We propose a methodology involving a knowledge engineering approach and a common-sense knowledge base to address the problem of deriving useful information from health records and, at the same time, preserve citizens' privacy. We perform extensive experiments involving a synthetic dataset of health records and a curated gold standard to demonstrate how our approach allows us to identify vulnerable people and interpret their particular needs while avoiding the disclosure of personal information.

Technical and Economic Models for a Global Patient co-Owned Cloud (GPOC)

“…The current global, socio-economic impact and burden of either conflict-related or environmental catastrophes have regained accelerated research attention due to recent geopolitical events and climate change. [1][2][3][4][5][6] Many have suggested that the use of personal health records could support an effective understanding of both acute and chronic diseases associated with these catastrophes that present a cross-border challenge to the medical community. 2 3 5 6 However, the economic impact of PHR designs for multi-user co-ownership is yet to be fully understood and modelled.…”

Towards a Knowledge Graph of Health Evolution

“…In the Smart City environment, data is gathered by different means and from different sources to improve city services. In recent years, attention has focused on using Electronic Health Records to assist emergency services [1,8,7].…”

“…This information could provide a snapshot of people's health status. For instance, identifying vulnerable people or people otherwise requiring special assistance in the context of an emergency [7,8]. However, assessing ongoing health issues represents a challenge to first responders.…”

Electronic health records perception among three healthcare providers specialties in Saudi Arabia: A cross‐sectional study

“…From the other side, many recent studies about EHR are becoming more specific with concentration on deep issues linked to answer questions like how to exploit EHR capabilities in analytics, prediction and managing diseases, epidemics, and pandemics [19]. Other studies stepped farther by investigating issues of integrating different EHR systems, data validation and data exchange with other information systems [20][21][22]. The outcomes of these studies have become more essential and attractive to all stakeholders in healthcare with COVID-19 pandemic outbreak [23][24][25].…”