A notion of event quality for contextualized planning and decision support systems

Abstract

This paper presents an approach for contextualizing an event-based decision support system for scheduling patient assessments in a hospital. To cope with unexpected delays, patient coordinators often pursue a worst case scenario when scheduling patient assessments, leading to an underutilization of human resources and equipment when the procedure went without complications. We present a context-based decision support system for patient planning that helps the patient coordinator with taking well-informed rescheduling decisions and anticipating changes in other patients' schedules. The system uses information and events produced by medical equipment. As these events can be non-deterministic, we demonstrate how our domain specific context model can be used to contextualize events to enhance their quality and ascertain their meaning. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.