Alerts for healthcare process and data integration

In healthcare chain workflow management, urgent requests and critical messages in these systems (referred to as alerts) have to be delivered and handled timely. Presently, most systems cannot address urgency and alerts are often handled in an ad-hoc manner. In this paper, we propose a sophisticated alert management system (AMS) for effective healthcare chain workflow management under urgent constraints. We develop a model for specifying alerts, in which alerts are associated with healthcare tasks and a set of parameters are captured for their routing and urgency requirements. Further, alerts also serve as a mechanism for both process and data integration. The AMS matches the specialties of healthcare personnel and functionalities of Web Services providers to receive an alert, based on the alert specification. We then propose a routing mechanism that is initiated when the alert message is not acknowledged or serviced within the deadline, so that the alert can be re-routed if necessary. Monitoring is especially essential to ensure timeliness and availability of services, otherwise suitable exceptions should be raised and handled. We outline our implementation framework with Web Services for communications among healthcare service providers and mobile devices for medical professionals. We demonstrate the applicability of our approach with a pilot prototype medical house-call system (MHCS) with evaluations of medical professionals.