Document Management Mechanism for Holistic Emergency Healthcare

A number of recent studies have showed that early and specialized pre-hospital patient management contributes significantly to emergency case survival. Along with the deployment and availability of appropriate emergency care resources, this also requires the availability of timely and relevant patient information to emergency medical service professionals. However, current healthcare information systems are characterized by heterogeneity and fragmentation, hindering emergency care professionals to have access to holistic or integrated patient information from the various organizations that participate in emergency care processes where and when needed. At the same time, many e-health programs have been undertaken worldwide in the area of emergency and unscheduled care with the objective to facilitate sharing of electronic patient information that may be considered important for the delivery of high quality emergency care and, hence, need to be readily available. In this vein, this paper takes a holistic view of the information needed in emergency healthcare and focuses on developing an appropriate tool for providing timely access to holistic care information by authorized users while retaining existing investments. Thus, a special purpose document management mechanism (DMM) is proposed that facilitates creating standardized XML documents from existing healthcare systems and that enables access to such documents at the point of care. For illustrative purposes, the mechanism has been incorporated into a prototype, cloud-based holistic EMS system.