A Framework for Public Health Monitoring, Analytics and Research

Fatima Khalique,Shoab A Khan,Irum Nosheen

doi:10.1109/access.2019.2930730

Abstract

This paper presents a framework for public healthcare data acquisition and management model based on standard protocol for its easy adoption by any country or international health organizations. The model assumes basic digitization of electronic health record (EHR) at basic health facilities. Thus far, the models in the literature have utilized EHR in multiple secondary contexts; however, there is a gap in developing an integrated and comprehensive framework that addresses the use of EHR in a standardized way for public health, privacy issue by anonymizing patient specific information, fusing multiple records with slight changes in the same information, augmenting a broad spectrum of contextual data, and so on. We present a framework that can be used in the context for acquisition and transmission of EHR from multiple sources as an evidence base for addressing public health-related activities, including surveillance, registries, and immunization record keeping while addressing all the gaps we have identified in the literature that are critical for developing countries. In addition, EHR data are also effectively processed to serve as a knowledge base for building artificial intelligence-based research models. We, in our model, utilize Health Level Seven (HL7) as an interoperability health standard and recommend creation of specialized data marts to support public health and research-related knowledge bases. The proposed framework in its adoption provides a very effective platform for generating alerts and alarms along with providing statistics for better planning of healthcare-related issues at national, district, or at any level of administrative hierarchy. It is applicable to any country even when there is no standard EHR and has hospitals working in silos with limited digitalization. We have validated this framework for its mapping to a national level public health hierarchy in Pakistan.

Highlights

The public health policies and their impact on population relies on the evidence base collected for the decision making process
Khalique et al.: Framework for Public Health Monitoring, Analytics, and Research to achieve the full potential of secondary use of Electronic Health Records (EHR) including utilization of EHR as a population health representation source and performing Machine Learning(ML) and Artificial Intelligence(AI) based analysis to achieve the meaningful use of health data in public health domain
The EHR system have emerged as a useful evidence base in public health informatics in addition to its primary purpose of electronic medical data storage

Summary

INTRODUCTION

The public health policies and their impact on population relies on the evidence base collected for the decision making process. F. Khalique et al.: Framework for Public Health Monitoring, Analytics, and Research to achieve the full potential of secondary use of EHR including utilization of EHR as a population health representation source and performing Machine Learning(ML) and Artificial Intelligence(AI) based analysis to achieve the meaningful use of health data in public health domain. In many countries including Pakistan, public health related activities are done under multiple programs that provide highly controlled data for building intelligence over a population health and addressing policies for ongoing and emerging health related issues [8]–[10]. These programs deal with specific diseases, outbreaks or general well being of a population and may run in parallel inter-dependently or separately.

RELATED WORK

CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK VIEW

ANALYSIS AND DISCUSSION

Findings

CONCLUSION