A Grid Enabled Framework for Ubiquitous Healthcare Service Provisioning
Oludayo, O., Olugbara, Sunday, Sunday Olusegun Ojo, Oommen P. Mathew · InTech eBooks · 2011
Advances in Grid Computing 230 services and misuse of healthcare resources is also a challenge in many parts of the world.A comprehensive discussion on the general challenges facing the healthcare sector has been given (Sneha & Varshney, 2006).The process of healthcare management is indisputably a life-critical one that demands for the involvement of human beings to manage the health of others.Patients' health data are usually kept and managed securely within an hospital environment.Anywhere a patient goes, the history of his/her treatments is supposed to follow, but this is currently not the case around the world.Each time a patient visits a new hospital there would be demand for history of treatments from the patient.Consequently, patient mobility is not supported by the conventional healthcare system.This process definitely requires transformation in order to accurately diagnose a patient, because it is practically impossible for patients to correctly remember all the history of their treatments for accurate diagnosis to take place.The non-standardization of diagnosis and treatment often expressed by the slogan different hospital, different treatment is another important issue in healthcare management.Moreover, the direct involvement of human beings in the main activities of healthcare implies high probability for making mistakes as a result of possible incorrect prescriptions of medications that can be made for patients and this can lead to lives being lost.An important question to ask is to what extent can healthcare practitioners avoid mistakes?It is difficult to completely avoid human mistakes, but mistakes can be considerably minimized by using automated procedures, tools and systems to support our daily activities and to transform the conventional ways that we do things.Automated systems have the capability to correct a user in the process of making mistakes.The conventional healthcare system therefore, strives to overcome the difficulties inherent in the management of patient data, standardization of diverse data formats to support interoperability, acquisition of data from remote patients, efficient extraction and analysis of relevant content knowledge, federation of disparate healthcare databases as well as privacy and confidentiality of healthcare information.As such, many private and public hospitals are still in the practice of using conventional healthcare system to facilitate the process of diagnosis, treatment and prescription.This process is mainly manual, labor intensive, prone to mistakes and involves much paper work and the use of standalone systems for productivity enhancement.This approach gives variation and disparity in healthcare services and makes standardization and interoperability of healthcare infrastructure extremely difficult.Today, the healthcare challenge facing many developing countries, including South Africa is how to extend quality and affordable healthcare services to a large number of people, especially those in the rural areas.This challenge suggests the necessity for ubiquitous healthcare service provisioning system and attests to the relevance of this study to our immediate society.The remainder of this chapter is succinctly outlined as follows: Section 2 presents our contributions.Section 3 discusses the state of the art in telemedicine technology.Section 4 discusses the state of the art in grid computing in healthcare.Section 5 presents our grid enabled framework for ubiquitous healthcare service provisioning.Section 6 presents an evaluation of our framework based on ubiquitous evaluation areas.Section 7 gives conclusion of the chapter and discusses our future work. ContributionsThis chapter describes our current effort to design and evaluate a grid enabled framework for ubiquitous healthcare service provisioning.The limitations of conventional healthcare