Ontology based alerting system for electronic whiteboard in a public hospital

Abstract

Electronic Whiteboard Systems are introduced in hospitals to manage tasks and to send alerts about patient health status. In a critical environment such as emergency care, where professionals work under pressure, alert systems contribute to the information visualization, which must be shared by the complete team of health professionals in decision making. This paper presents a practical ontology application in the alert system development for electronic whiteboard at the University Hospital of Maringá-PR. The proposed model uses an ontological layer to identify, evaluate and produce warnings for the Hospital health team. The ontology was defined by mapping the system database schema and complemented with the knowledge of experts in the nursing area, who work in the hospital emergency unit. The ontology use was evaluated based on the task of analyzing and defining the alert emission on the whiteboard, considering the response time and usefulness of the issued alerts. The results indicate that the use of the ontology contributes to the alerts definition and delivery, however, it is necessary to use a hardware with good processing capacity and memory. Positive evaluations with users in real environment indicate that the alerts issued on the board are useful and contribute to the activities of health professionals.