European and Turkish doctors and technicians have developed a medical support system, Saphire, which can track patients’ real-time vital signs, link them to patient medical history, and provide the latest clinical guidelines for patient care.
The Intelligent Clinical Decision Support System (ICDSS) can also alert doctors when necessary and offers a range of services that combine scattered information stored in different systems into a new, more powerful application.
Mehmet Olduz, a researcher with Saphire, said: “The team included XSLT [Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations] mapping ability as well as ontology mapping which has given a considerable performance improvement to the system.”
In practical terms, XSLT converts one type of XML [Extensible Markup Language] to another type, for example it translates medical records into a standard format and integrates them with patients’ real-time vital signs – a huge advance according to the developers.
The team initially used web services to access patient Electronic Healthcare Records (EHRs), before switching to a standard called Healthcare Cross-Enterprise Clinical Document Sharing (IHE-XDS).
Olduz said the system is unique in healthcare: “I think what makes Saphire unique is the semi-automatic deployment of clinical guidelines to healthcare institutes.”
“There had been efforts to computerise the guidelines and automatically execute them, for example Guideline Interchange Format (GLIF), but these attempts mainly focused on sharing of guidelines and had to be manually deployed to the computer or device. The European Funded Saphire solves this,” suggests Olduz.
The team has finished the technical implementation and now it will go forward with the pilots, both in a hospital and home setting.
Doctors hope it will mean certain patients can be transferred to regular wards sooner, freeing beds in critical care units.
The system has also been designed to provide a boost to the training of young doctors and it should minimise the risk of medical errors, and a far better level of at home care too.
The team are now seeking to commercialise the Saphire platform for use in hospitals globally.
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Joe Fernandez