Towards a resilient health status assessment employing intelligence in cyber physical systems

Abstract

-Resilience is defined as the capacity of a system to cope with a hazardous event or disturbance, responding or reorganizing in ways that maintain its essential function, identity, and structure, while also maintaining the capacity for adaptation, learning and transformation. A resilient health system is one that is capable to anticipate, respond to, cope with, recover from and adapt to system-related shocks and stress, so as to bring sustained improvements in population health, despite the unstable circumstances. Nowadays, the emergency department (ED) of hospitals faces growing demands, rising acuteness and longer waiting times. An efficient, accurate and resilient triage system to improve the operation of the ED becomes crucial. In this work, a resilient system for automatic priority, sorting and monitoring of medical events -triage system-is developed, so that the patients in the ED are treated according to the severity of their condition and not by the order of attendance utilizing a Fuzzy Inference System (FIS) that aggregates, processes patients' vital signs as well as determines their Health Status (HS), according to which the ED staff performs the appropriate classification. IntroductionThe ED is an autonomous part of the hospital that aims to receive, revitalize, diagnose and treat patients with a variety of emergencies that cover the full range of diseases, injuries and disorders. Effective emergency response is a matter of utmost importance for the reliability of every health system. Nowadays, the ED faces serious problems due to the massive occurrence of incidents that create crowded conditions, increased waiting times and other undesirable effects. Increasing needs and requirements and increasing demands for healthcare monitoring and patient assistance pose challenges that need to be addressed by improving current health systems and infrastructures. The use of technology contributes effective and decisive to enhance the operation of ED. The need to provide a high level of medical services and the need for rapid and reliable recording of medical and other data, which data in ED can even judge the outcome of an incident, make the use of an appropriately adapted information system imperative. The development and exploitation of such a system is a significant improvement in the operation of the ED. During ED crowding and all the malfunctions it causes there is an imbalance between the need for emergency care and available resources, which enhances the need for accurate triage [1]. Triage is a process that is critical to the effective management of modern EDs. Triage systems are used in EDs to prioritize patients and to ensure that they are seen in order of clinical need when demand exceeds capacity. They do this by determining who will not be disadvantaged by longer waiting times and who requires immediate attention and urgent medical care to achieve optimal outcomes. There are several protocols and methods that are used for triage in EDs (ED Triage), which differ in both patient assessment cr...