Improvement of patient safety in u-hospital: A pattern-based approach for handling patients’ abnormal situations

Abstract

This paper presents a pattern-based approach for handling abnormal situations of a patient appropriately. In order to identify and model patterns of abnormal situations, we apply ontology technology. Several important patterns have been identified and they can be managed by the proposed system. We have designed a system architecture of integrating BPM and ontology, and developed core part of the proposed system. The integrated system is called u-PMS (ubiquitous Patient Management System). It can detect meaningful events and abnormal situations which affect health status of a patient, and manage healthcare processes to cope with the abnormal situations in process centric way. By applying context awareness technology and ontology technology to healthcare sector, patient safety can be improved significantly. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2013.