Emergency healthcare process automation using workflow technology and web services.
Emergency healthcare delivery involves a variety of interrelated activities performed from the time of a call to the ambulance service until the time of patient's exit from the emergency department of a hospital. As these activities can be viewed as parts of inter-organizational healthcare processes that involve at least two organizations (e.g. an ambulance service and a hospital), there is a need to provide the appropriate technological infrastructure for automating and managing these processes even in cases where the organizations involved use heterogeneous systems to support their internal services. Web-based workflow systems in conjunction with web services present a new way for service-oriented integration (SOI) of disparate systems and for developing distributed applications within and between organizations. Thus, process automation with the use of web services can provide an appropriate infrastructure for the integration of pre-hospital and in-hospital emergency healthcare. A prototype development of such a system is presented in this paper.
Poulymenopoulou
M
M
Department of Informatics, University of Piraeus, Piraeus, 185 34, Greece.
Malamateniou
F
F
Vassilacopoulos
G
G
D000552:Ambulances / Q000458:organization & administration* / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D003199:Computer Systems; D017598:Efficiency, Organizational; D001330:Electronic Data Processing; D004636:Emergency Service, Hospital / Q000458:organization & administration* / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D006115:Greece; D006801:Humans; D020407:Internet; D008331:Management Information Systems; D018511:Systems Integration