Adaptive healthcare processes for personalized emergency clinical pathways.

Pre-hospital and in-hospital emergency healthcare delivery involves a variety of activities and people that should be coordinated in order effectively to create an emergency care plan. Emergency care provided by emergency healthcare professionals can be improved by personalized emergency clinical pathways that are instances of relevant emergency clinical guidelines based on emergency case needs as well as on ambulance and hospital resource availability, while also enabling better resource use. Business Process Management Systems (BPMSs) in conjunction with semantic technologies can be used to support personalized emergency clinical pathways by incorporating clinical guidelines logic into the emergency healthcare processes at run-time according to emergency care context information (current emergency case and resource information). On these grounds, a framework is proposed that uses ontology to model knowledge on emergency case medical history, on healthcare resource availability, on relevant clinical guidelines and on process logic; this is inferred to result in the most suitable process model for the case, in line with relevant clinical guidelines.