Incorporation of GIS, Grid Computing and RFID into National Health Information Federation toward Seamless Infectious Disaster Management

Abstract

Several healthcare disasters have arisen in the past decade. The application requirements for such a system include effective, coordinated responses to disease and injury, accurate surveillance of area hospitals and efficient management of clinical and research information. Based on the application requirements, this work describes a health information federation that monitors and detects national infectious events using GIS, RFID and grid computing technology. This system is fault-tolerant, highly secure, flexible and extensible. It has a low cost of deployment, and is designed for large-scale and quick responses. Owing to the federation nature of the network, no central server or data center needs to be built. To reinforce the responsiveness of the national health information federation, this work proposes a practical, tracking-based, spatially-aware, steady-to-use and flexible architecture, based on GIS and RFID, for developing successful infectious disaster management plans to tackle technical issues. The proposed architecture achieves a common understanding of spatial data and processes. Therefore, the proposed system can efficiently and effectively share, compare and federate yet integrate most local health information providers and results for more informed planning and better outcomes.