Chapter 9 Alerts in Healthcare Applications : Process and Data Integration

Urgent requests and critical messages in healthcare applications must be delivered and handled timely instead of in an ad-hoc manner for most current systems. Therefore, we extend a sophisticated alert management system (AMS) to handle process and data integration in healthcare chain workflow management under urgency constraints. Alerts are associated with healthcare tasks to capture the parameters for their routing and urgency requirements in order to match them with the specialties of healthcare personnel or the functionalities of Web Services providers. Monitoring is essential to ensure the timeliness and availability of services as well as to ensure the identification of exceptions. We outline our implementation framework with Web Services for the communications among healthcare service providers together with mobile devices for medical professionals. We demonstrate the applicability of our approach with a prototype medical house-call system (MHCS) and evaluate our approach with medical professionals and various stakeholders. Dickson K.W. Chiu Dickson Computer Systems, Hong Kong Benny W. C. Kwok The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong Ray L. S. Wong The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong Marina Kafeza University Hospital of Heraklion, Greece S.C. Cheung Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong Eleanna Kafeza Athens University of Economics and Business, Greece Patrick C.K. Hung University of Ontario Institute of Technology, Canada Alerts in Healthcare Applications