Management and Analysis of Time-Related Data in Internet-Based Healthcare Delivery

Abstract

Technological advancements have and will continue to revolutionize the way healthcare is being delivered and the interaction between patients and healthcare professionals. A key component to these changes will be an extension to the utilization of the Internet, further exploiting the extensible and interoperable features it offers. In addition to providing a distributed communications infrastructure, the ability to incorporate within Internet-based systems a means of intelligent data analysis in supporting healthcare management has now become a reality. In this chapter, we provide the rationale for usage of the Internet as a core infrastructure for a holistic approach to distributed healthcare management and supplement this through the identification of the potential role of temporal reasoning in addressing the time relevance of patient centered clinical information. Our work is exemplified through case studies where Internet-based systems and temporal reasoning may be employed.