SAPHIRE

The aim of the SAPHIRE project is to develop an intelligent healthcare monitoring and decision support system on a platform integrating the wireless medical sensor data (e.g. ECG, blood pressure, SpO2) with patient data from hospital information systems. Intelligent monitoring and decision support provided to the healthcare professionals is based on automation of the state-of-the-art clinical guidelines, which are implemented as computer-executable models. These clinical guideline models are executed by a number of intelligent software agents, and access to variety of sensor data and medical data is handled through semantically enriched Web services. Real-time monitoring of clinical guideline execution is realized through user-friendly graphical interfaces, which is supported by mobile and Web based notification mechanisms for the healthcare professionals.

The achievements of the project was successfully demonstrated through two pilot applications: (i) for monitoring of cardiovascular patients (specifically patients with Acute Coronary Syndrome and patients with Heart Failure) in Emergency Hospital of Bucharest in Romania, and (ii) for homecare monitoring of cardiovascular patients (specifically patients suffering from ischemic heart disease followed by a revascularization therapy) in Schüchtermann-Klinik in Germany.

In addition to coordinating the project, SRDC Team was the main R&D partner of the project. Our achievements can be summarized as follows:

• Extension of the Guideline Interchange Format (GLIF) to bind the virtual data points to actual patient data sources, such as Hospital Information System data, and hence to make it executable by computers
• Modeling of the state-of-the-art clinical guidelines for cardiovascular diseases in the extended GLIF format in collaboration with the healthcare professionals
• Development of the agent based intelligent monitoring and decision support system
• Development of the user-friendly clinical guideline execution graphical interface
• Development of semantically enriched Web services on top of hospital information systems, for standards based interoperable access to patient data
• Development of the alert and notification mechanism to notify healthcare professionals when necessary through SMS, email or Web
• Developing standard based security and privacy mechanisms to ensure protection of patient data
• 1 PhD, 3 Msc theses and several publications