Types of Resources and their Discover in HealthGrids

Author(s):  
Aisha Naseer ◽  
Lampros Stergiolas

Adoption of cutting edge technologies in order to facilitate various healthcare operations and tasks is significant. There is a need for health information systems to be fully integrated with each other and provide interoperability across various organizational domains for ubiquitous access and sharing. The emerging technology of HealthGrids holds the promise to successfully integrate health information systems and various healthcare entities onto a common, globally shared and easily accessible platform. This chapter presents a systematic taxonomy of different types of HealthGrid resources, where the specialized resources can be categorised into three major types; namely, Data or Information or Files (DIF); Applications & Peripherals (AP); and Services. Resource discovery in HealthGrids is an emerging challenge comprising many technical issues encapsulating performance, consistency, compatibility, heterogeneity, integrity, aggregation and security of life-critical data. To address these challenges, a systematic search strategy could be devised and adopted, as the discovered resource should be valid, refined and relevant to the query. Standards could be implemented on domain-specific metadata. This chapter proposes potential solutions for the discovery of different types of HealthGrid resources and reflects on discovering and integrating data resources.

2011 ◽  
pp. 913-932
Author(s):  
Aisha Naseer ◽  
Lampros K. Stergioulas

Healthcare is a vast domain encapsulating not only multiple sub-domains or sub-sectors but also many diverse operations and logistics within each sub-sector. This diversity needs to be handled in a systematic and well-characterized manner in order to maintain consistency of various healthcare tasks. Integration of health information systems within each healthcare sub-sectors is crucial for ubiquitous access and sharing of information. The emerging technology of HealthGrids holds the promise to successfully integrate health information systems and various healthcare entities onto a common, globally shared and easily accessible platform. Many different types of HealthGrids exist but there lacks a taxonomy to classify them into a hierarchical order. This chapter presents a well-characterized taxonomy of different types of HealthGrid and classifies them into four major types, namely BioGrid, MediGrid, PharmaGrid and CareGrid. Each of these HealthGrids possesses dedicated features and functionalities. The proposed taxonomy serves to better understand the realtionship among various HealthGrid types and would lay a basis for future research.


Author(s):  
Aisha Naseer ◽  
Lampros K. Stergioulas

Healthcare is a vast domain encapsulating not only multiple sub-domains or sub-sectors but also many diverse operations and logistics within each sub-sector. This diversity needs to be handled in a systematic and well-characterized manner in order to maintain consistency of various healthcare tasks. Integration of health information systems within each healthcare sub-sectors is crucial for ubiquitous access and sharing of information. The emerging technology of HealthGrids holds the promise to successfully integrate health information systems and various healthcare entities onto a common, globally shared and easily accessible platform. Many different types of HealthGrids exist but there lacks a taxonomy to classify them into a hierarchical order. This chapter presents a well-characterized taxonomy of different types of HealthGrid and classifies them into four major types, namely BioGrid, MediGrid, PharmaGrid and CareGrid. Each of these HealthGrids possesses dedicated features and functionalities. The proposed taxonomy serves to better understand the realtionship among various HealthGrid types and would lay a basis for future research.


Author(s):  
Jim Warren ◽  
Karen Day ◽  
Martin Orr

In this chapter we aim to promote an understanding of the complexity of healthcare as a setting for information systems and how this complexity influences the achievement of successful implementations. We define health informatics and examine its role as an enabler in the delivery of healthcare. Then we look at the knowledge commodity culture of healthcare, with the gold standard of systematic reviews and its hierarchy of evidence. We examine the different forms of quantitative and qualitative research that are most commonly found in healthcare and how they influence the requirements for health information systems. We also examine some domain-specific issues that must be considered by health information systems developers, including those around clinical decision support systems and clinical classification and coding systems. We conclude with a discussion of the challenges that must be balanced by the health systems implementer in delivering robust systems that support evidence-based healthcare processes.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aimé Patrice KOUMAMBA ◽  
Ulrick Jolhy BISVIGOU ◽  
Edgard Brice NGOUNGOU ◽  
Gayo DIALLO

Abstract Background: In developing countries, health information systems (HIS) is experiencing more and more difficult to produce quality data. The lack of reliable health information makes it difficult to develop effective health policies. In order to understand the organization of HIS in African countries, we undertook a literature review.Methods: Our study was conducted using the PubMed and Scopus bibliographic search engines. Our inclusion criteria were: (i) all articles published between 2005 and 2019, (ii) including in their titles the keywords "health", "information", "systems", "system", "africa", "developing countries", "santé", "pays en développement", "Afrique", (iii) written in English and French, (iv) dealing with organizational and technical issues of HIS in African countries.Results: Fourteen articles out of 2492 retrieved were included in the study, of which 13 (92.9%) were qualitative. All of them dealt with issues related to HIS in 12 African countries. All 12 countries (100.0%) had opted for a data warehouse approach to improve their HIS. This approach, supported by the DHIS2 application, had provided them with reliable data. However, 11 of the 12 countries (92.0%) were aligned with donor strategies and lacked a national strategy. Conclusion: This study helped us to understand that the lack of a national health information management strategy will always be a threat to HIS performance in African countries. Ideally, rigorous upstream thinking to strengthen HIS governance should be undertaken by defining and proposing a coherent conceptual framework to analyze and guide the development and integration of digital applications into HIS over the long term.


2001 ◽  
Vol 40 (04) ◽  
pp. 275-287 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. A. Giuse ◽  
K. A. Kuhn

Summary Objectives: Hospital information systems are evolving towards health information systems. This article aims at identifying both proven benefits and critical issues, and at discussing problems and possible solutions. Methods: Reports on HIS successes and failures were analyzed, and core challenges were identified. These challenges are discussed against state of the art solutions. Results: In spite of demonstrated benefits, there are more severe problems than reports on successes suggest. Among today’s core problems are integration, human-computer interaction, socio-technical issues, and support of processes. Conclusions: Significant efforts of all parties involved in the health care process are needed to improve, implement, and evaluate the concepts described.


1998 ◽  
Vol 37 (04/05) ◽  
pp. 518-526 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. Sauquet ◽  
M.-C. Jaulent ◽  
E. Zapletal ◽  
M. Lavril ◽  
P. Degoulet

AbstractRapid development of community health information networks raises the issue of semantic interoperability between distributed and heterogeneous systems. Indeed, operational health information systems originate from heterogeneous teams of independent developers and have to cooperate in order to exchange data and services. A good cooperation is based on a good understanding of the messages exchanged between the systems. The main issue of semantic interoperability is to ensure that the exchange is not only possible but also meaningful. The main objective of this paper is to analyze semantic interoperability from a software engineering point of view. It describes the principles for the design of a semantic mediator (SM) in the framework of a distributed object manager (DOM). The mediator is itself a component that should allow the exchange of messages independently of languages and platforms. The functional architecture of such a SM is detailed. These principles have been partly applied in the context of the HEllOS object-oriented software engineering environment. The resulting service components are presented with their current state of achievement.


1979 ◽  
Vol 18 (04) ◽  
pp. 214-222
Author(s):  
K. Sauter

The problems encountered in achieving data security within computer-supported information systems increased with the development of modern computer systems. The threats are manifold and have to be met by an appropriate set of hardware precautions, organizational procedures and software measures which are the topic of this paper. Design principles and software construction rules are treated first, since the security power of a system is considerably determined by its proper design. A number of software techniques presented may support security mechanisms ranging from user identification and authentication to access control, auditing and threat monitoring. Encryption is a powerful tool for protecting data during physical storage and transmission as well.Since an increasing number of health information systems with information-integrating functions are database-supported, the main issues and terms of database systems and their specific security aspects are summarized in the appendix.


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