Skip to main content

Advertisement

SpringerLink
Log in

E-EPR: a workflow-based electronic emergency patient record

  • Original Article
  • Published:
Personal and Ubiquitous Computing Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Emergency care is, politically and socially, one of the highest priorities in society today. Increasing patient expectations and the advancement of scientific and medical knowledge has had a dramatic effect on the provision of emergency care. Emergency medical services (EMSs) perform pre-hospital and in-hospital emergency care activities, operate 24 h a day/7 days a week and constitute an important link between the community (primary care) and the hospital (secondary and tertiary care). Managing emergency care involves assessing individual needs to create a coordinated plan of care that is consistent with agreed priorities and is designed to bring optimal outcomes using cost-effective care. Emergency care is vital for avoiding death and chronic suffering by the elderly and the homeless, but its overall positive effect on the long-term health and overall well-being of these people can only be improved significantly by applying holistic principles, going beyond basic medical care to offer psychological and social support as far as possible. Thus, creating appropriate emergency care plans requires collaboration and coordination among EMS and social care providers, giving rise to a more holistic approach to emergency care management. In turn, this requires the availability of integrated patient information to authorized individuals of health and social care providers when and where needed. On these grounds, the development of a workflow-based electronic patient record (E-EPR) for emergency care is described which is provided as a service on a cloud. The E-EPR aims at supporting the execution of EMS workflows by providing integrated patient information to EMS process participants and to make this information shareable to health and social care professionals. Due to the heterogeneity of the participating organizations’ information systems, the E-EPR is built on top of an Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE)-based collaborative network consisting of EMS agencies and health and social care providers who share patient documents using IHE-based profiles. An experimental implementation of the E-EPR is also described.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 3

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  1. Amazon (2010) Amazon web services: overview of security processes. http://media.amazonwebservices.com/pdf/AWS_Security_Whitepaper.pdf. Accessed 12 July 2011

  2. Ambulance Service Network (2008) A vision for emergency and urgent care: the role of ambulance services. http://www.nhsconfed.org/Publications/Documents/A%20vision%20for%20emergency%20and%20urgent%20care.pdf. Accessed 10 Oct 2011

  3. Aftab S, Javed M (2011) Implementing integrating the healthcare environment (IHE) using business process execution language (BPEL). Eur J Sci Res 57(1):109–123

    Google Scholar 

  4. Andreasson S, Winge M (2010) Innovations for sustainable health and social care: value-creating health and social care processes based on patient need. Vinnova, Sweden

    Google Scholar 

  5. Benyoucef M, Kuziemsky C, Rad A, Elsabbahi A (2011) Modeling healthcare processes as service orchestrations and choreographies. Bus Process Manag J 17(4):568–597

    Article  Google Scholar 

  6. Beul S, Mennicken S, Ziefle M, Jakobs E (2010) What happens after calling the ambulance: information, communication, and acceptance issues in a telemedical workflow. In: Proceedings of international conference information society i-society ‘10, London, UK, pp 111–116

  7. Delgado M, Ferry D (2011) The evolution of healthcare IT: are current US privacy policies ready for the clouds? In: Proceedings of IEEE conference World Congress, Washington, DC, pp 371–378

  8. Dogac A, Laleci GB, Aden T, Eichelberg M (2007) Enhancing IHE XDS for federated clinical affinity domain support. IEEE Trans Inf Technol Biomed 11(2):213–221

    Article  Google Scholar 

  9. Finnell J, Overhage J (2010) Emergency medical services: the frontier in health information exchange. In: Proceedings of AMIA 2010 annual symposium, Washington, USA, pp 222–226

  10. Giorgio Τ, Ripa T, Zuccal Μ (2010) An approach to enable replacement of SOAP services and REST services in lightweight processes. In: Proceedings of 10th international conference web engineering ICWE’10, Vienna, Austria

  11. Hameed S, Hassan A, Shabnam S, Miho V, Khalifa O (2008) An efficient emergency, healthcare, and medical information system. Int J Biometrics Bioinforma 2(5):1–9

    Google Scholar 

  12. Huang X, Liou D (2010) Implementation of an electronic emergency referral document system. In: Proceedings of 2nd international conference on education technology and computer ICETC’10, Shanghai, China, pp 93–96

  13. Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (2007) IHE IT infrastructure white paper HIE security and privacy through IHE. http://www.ihe.net/Technical_Framework/upload/IHE_ITI_Whitepaper_Security_and_Privacy_2007_07_18.pdf. Accessed 12 Sep 2011

  14. Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (2009) EMS transfer of care. http://www.ihe.net/Technical_Framework/upload/IHE_PCC_EMS_Transfer_Of_Care_ETC_PC_-2009-08-10.pdf. Accessed 12 Sep 2011

  15. Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (2011) Cross-enterprise document sharing. http://wiki.ihe.net/index.php?title=Cross-Enterprise_Document_Sharing. Accessed 12 July 2011

  16. Poulymenopoulou M, Malamateniou F, Vassilacopoulos G (2011) Emergency healthcare process automation using mobile computing and cloud services. J Med Syst (published online—ahead of print)

  17. Poulymenopoulou M, Malamateniou F, Vassilacopoulos G (2003) Emergency healthcare process automation using workflow technology and web services. Med Inform Internet Med 28(3):195–207

    Google Scholar 

  18. Reddy M, Paul S, Abraham J, McNeese M, DeFlitch C, Yen J (2009) Challenges to effective crisis management: using information and communication technologies to coordinate emergency medical services and emergency department teams. Int J Med Inform 78:259–269

    Article  Google Scholar 

  19. Rigbya M, Hill P, Kochc S, Keelingd D (2011) Social care informatics as an essential part of holistic health care: a call for action. Int J Med Inform 80:544–554

    Article  Google Scholar 

  20. Rizk E (2010) Holistic care management requires IT integration. Manag Care 19(9):43–45

    Google Scholar 

  21. Russ A, Saleem J, Justice C, Woodward-Hagg H, Woodbridge P, Doebbeling B (2010) Electronic health information in use: characteristics that support employee workflow and patient care. Health Inform J 16(4):287–305

    Article  Google Scholar 

  22. Schooley B, Hilton B, Abed Y (2011) Process improvement and consumer-oriented design of an inter-organizational information system for emergency medical response. In: Proceedings of 44th international conference on system science, Hawaii, USA, pp 1–10

  23. Schooley B, Marich M, Horan T (2007) Devising an architecture for time-critical information services: inter-organizational performance data components for emergency medical service (EMS). In: Proceedings of 8th annual international digital government research, Pennsylvania, USA, pp 164–172

  24. Spitzer M, Verst H, Juhra C, Ueckert F (2009) Trauma network north-west: Improving holistic care for trauma patients by means of internet and mobile technologies. In: Proceedings of medical informatics in a United and Healthy Europe MIE 2009. IOS Press, Vaasa, Finland, pp 371–375

  25. Stolba N, Schanner A (2007) eHealth integrator: clinical data integration in lower Austria. In: Proceedings of international conference on computing intelligence in medicine and health, Plymouth, England

  26. Timmermans J, Ikonen V, Stahl B, Bozdag E (2010) The ethics of cloud computing: a conceptual review. In: Proceedings of IEEE 2nd international conference on cloud computing technology Shi, pp 614–620

  27. Wilamuna C (2010) Getting Started with WSO2 Cloud Virtual Machines for Amazon EC2, Available from URL. http://wso2.org/library/articles/getting-started-wso2-cloud-virtual-machines-amazon-ec2. Last accessed 10 Dec 2010

  28. Zhao Q, Liu X, Sun D, Liu T, Li Y, Huang G (2010) Mashing-up rich user interfaces for human-interaction in WS-BPEL. In: Proceedings of IEEE international conference on web services ICWS 2010, pp 559–566

  29. Zhang R, Liu L (2010) Security models and requirements for healthcare application clouds. In: Proceedings of 3rd international conference on cloud computing IEEE cloud’10, Miami, Florida, USA, pp 268–275

Download references

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Piraeus, Piraeus, Greece

    M. Poulymenopoulou, F. Malamateniou & G. Vassilacopoulos

Authors
  1. M. Poulymenopoulou
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. F. Malamateniou
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. G. Vassilacopoulos
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to G. Vassilacopoulos.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Poulymenopoulou, M., Malamateniou, F. & Vassilacopoulos, G. E-EPR: a workflow-based electronic emergency patient record. Pers Ubiquit Comput 18, 91–100 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00779-012-0620-4

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00779-012-0620-4

Keywords

Search

Navigation