Context-aware Workflow Driven Resource Allocation for e-Healthcare

Abstract

Healthcare institutions are under increasing pressure to provide better services to more people using limited financial and human resources. How to handle more emergency cases with a limited budget and fewer resources as well as improve overall quality of service are important issues in the design of healthcare systems. One approach to meeting these requirements of healthcare is to take advantage of the context-aware computing. Despite the fact that several healthcare context-awareness projects have been launched, little work addresses the issues of automated resource allocation in healthcare context-aware computing. Our interests in this paper are to propose a framework to model resource allocation and monitor the medical processes in healthcare systems. In order to achieve this goal, we first propose model to describe the medical workflows in healthcare systems. Next, we propose models to capture resource activities in healthcare systems. Finally, the interactions between medical workflows and healthcare workers and resources are combined to obtain a complete model for the medical processes. Based on the aforementioned model, we propose architecture to monitor resource allocation in healthcare systems.