|
22nd February 2007 Oracle has announced that the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UT Houston) uses Semantic Web technology from Oracle and TopQuadrant, a Certified Partner in the Oracle PartnerNetwork, to enable public health preparedness and allow for improved decision making. UT-Houston's Situational Awareness and Preparedness for Public Health Incidences Using Reasoning Engines (or SAPPHIRE) system integrates a wide range of health and epidemiological data from local healthcare providers, hospitals and pharmacies. By applying social network analysis to the disparate data from multiple sources, healthcare providers can create a single, integrated metadata model to analyze, detect, and respond to public health matters. "Oracle and TopQuadrant allow UT-Houston to shift the center of gravity for public healthcare delivery by moving beyond symptom detection to large-scale public health surveillance, via trend monitoring, detection and response," said Parsa Mirhaji, M.D., director of the Center for Biosecurity and Public Health Informatics Research at the University of Texas School of Health Information Sciences at Houston. "As a result, the public health preparedness framework enables a semantic transformation from disparate data to actionable information that decision makers can easily access and compute." In a pilot project, UT-Houston used the Oracle and TopQuadrant-based approach as the basis of its SAPPHIRE system, which successfully monitored and analyzed public health information during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in the fall of 2005 to allow public health officials to make improved decisions. Tested during the Hurricane Katrina relief efforts in 2005, SAPPHIRE's surveillance techniques analyzed the health of evacuees at the Astrodome, Reliant Park and the George R. Brown Convention Center. A PDA extension of SAPPHIRE enabled more than 300 volunteers, led by the UT School of Public Health, to collect and analyze critical health data. The information gleaned from the nearly 9,000 confidential patient encounters helped caregivers respond to the specific needs of the Hurricane Katrina evacuees. "The principles that UT employed during the Katrina disaster could serve as a model for the nationwide efforts involving public health information," said Oracle Vice President of Health Industries Mychelle Mowry. "The integration between Oracle and TopBraid enables simpler navigation of disparate health data, better public health information exchange and improved bio-surveillance efforts -- ultimately helping to deliver better public healthcare."
Subscribe to the Wireless Healthcare free weekly newsletter
|
|
