Document Management Mechanism for Holistic Emergency Healthcare

Introduction

The fundamental challenge of a healthcare system is to serve a demand that has unlimited scope for increase with limited resources. Ageing populations, raising expectations and advances in life sciences drive demand for quantity and quality of health services. The difficulties that lie ahead are in reconciling individual needs stemming from those developments with the available financial and non-financial resources (Gooch, Rizk & Vest, 2010). Emergency medical services (EMSs) constitute vital components of healthcare systems as they deal with various kinds of accidents and emergencies, including the most critical acute illness and injury episodes that affect older people, people with chronic diseases and other population groups (Burnside, 2008; Beul & Finell, 2010; Feufell, 2011). Thus, modern health services are expected to provide high quality emergency healthcare in the most cost-effective and appropriate manner.

Conceptually, EMSs are concerned with the provision of both pre-hospital and in-hospital emergency healthcare and their operations typically involve a wide range of interdependent and distributed activities, performed by cooperating individuals (medical, nursing, paramedical and administrative) who differ on levels of background, skill, knowledge and status. As these activities can be interconnected to form emergency healthcare processes within and between the participating organizations (i.e., ambulance services and hospitals), EMSs can be viewed as virtual emergency healthcare enterprises where the cooperative effort of these individuals must be coordinated, aligned, integrated and meshed in order to improve organizational performance (Burnside, 2008; Greenhalgh, 2010). Hence, it is important to define and automate, through suitable information delivery tools, EMS processes, from the time of a call for an ambulance to the time of patient discharge from a hospital, that span organizational boundaries so that to create and empower collaboration and coordination among the participating organizations (Poulymenopoulou, Schooley & Xie, 2011). This paper describes a document management mechanism (DMM) for assembling comprehensive emergency patient information from existing systems and making it readily available to authorized users in the form of standards-based XML documents.