Real-Time Automated Hazard Detection Framework for Health Information Technology Systems

ABSTRACT

An increase in the reliability of Health Information Technology (HIT) will facilitate institutional trust and credibility of the systems. In this paper, we present an end-to-end framework for improving the reliability and performance of HIT systems. Specifically, we describe the system model, present some of the methods that drive the model, and discuss an initial implementation of two of the proposed methods using data from the Veterans Affairs HIT and Corporate Data Warehouse systems. The contributions of this paper, thus, include (1) the design of a system model for monitoring and detecting hazards in HIT systems, (2) a data-driven approach for analysing the health care data warehouse, (3) analytical methods for characterising and analysing failures in HIT systems, and (4) a tool architecture for generating and reporting hazards in HIT systems. Our goal is to work towards an automated system that will help identify opportunities for improvements in HIT systems.

KEYWORDS:

• Health information technology
• hazard detection
• statistical process control
• Markov chain
• transaction process model
• corporate data warehouse

Acknowledgments

This work is sponsored by the US Department of Veterans Affairs. This manuscript has been authored by UT-Battelle LLC under contract DE-AC05-00OR22725 with the US Department of Energy (DOE). The US government retains and the publisher, by accepting the article for publication, acknowledges that the US government retains a nonexclusive, paid-up, irrevocable, worldwide license to publish or reproduce the published form of this manuscript, or allow others to do so, for US government purposes. DOE will provide public access to these results of federally sponsored research in accordance with the DOE Public Access Plan (http://energy.gov/downloads/doe-public-access-plan).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. https://www.data.va.gov/dataset/veterans-health-information-systems-and-technology-architecture-vista.

2. https://www.data.va.gov/dataset/corporate-data-warehouse-cdw.

3. https://www.va.gov/vdl/documents/Infrastructure/Fileman/fm22_2um1.pdf.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.