Public Health Situation Awareness with Semantic Web

A third example of the power of Semantic Web in health related areas is the public health situational awareness. Public health observation “is the ongoing collection and analysis of data to identify and respond to community health problems in a timely manner” [1]. It is common the important public health information is spread across many databases. Information about gastrointestinal or respiratory illness, water contamination, and air quality, is typically available through emergency room database records. However, the meaningful integration of these databases is necessary for them to be of use in public health surveillance systems.

The School of Health Information Science of the University of Texas has developed a system based on Semantic Web technology that integrates unstructured text such as doctors’ notes and patient complaints into structured electronic medical records. Code named SAPPHIRE (Situational Awareness and Preparedness for Public Health Incidences and Reasoning Engines), the system also facilitates the recovery and consolidation of all medical record information through a unified query interface, regardless of how (structured, unstructured) and where (text files, database tables, spreadsheets, etc.) the data is stored. Additionally, SAPPHIRE contextualizes data for a variety of different tasks. For example, creates models for identifying patients with influenza-like symptoms with neurological or gastrointestinal side effects to identify categories of outbreaks.

The prototype can be modeled to dynamically absorb the latest data feeds from external databases, then make new interpretations of the data accordingly. These capabilities were demonstrated during hurricane Katrina, where SAPPHIRE “was extended to accommodate data from a just-in-time PDA based questionnaire, a clinical information system from Katrina shelters and surveillance reports captured by the Houston Department of Health, and to support signal detection and reporting on diseases and syndromes defined by field epidemiologists. SAPPHIRE was the sole surveillance technology to address these needs within eight hours of the shelters opening, using Internet and Semantic Web technology”.

References

Mirhaji, P. (2007). Case study: Semantic web technology for public health surveillance, university of texas. Retrieved 5/17/2010, 2010, from http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/sweo/public/UseCases/UniTexas/