Ontology knowledge map for enhancing health care services: a case of emergency unit of specialist hospital

Abstract

In developing countries, the health care spending has been constantly increasing in the last decades, and statistics has shown a lot of lapses in the running of the affairs of the health care systems. As a result, there is serious need to introduce new and innovative way of doing certain transaction in the hospitals in order to improve the total efficiency of the hospitals. To address this, we propose a method based on Ontology knowledge map to locate the unnecessary transactions that must be redesigned to improve the healthcare management. We carefully choose this methodology to address the problem statement because it tend to gives a better understanding of the general and dynamic situation of the Hospital emergency unit (EU), and at the same time provides a good alignment between the operation and enterprise design. The method was tested in the EU of the state specialist Hospital Damaturu, where we have succeed in locating some transactions that can be redesign or removed. Evaluation of this methodology was done by means of observations, interviews and feedback from practitioners. . A result shows that there are a lot of unnecessary process in the emergency unit which we are able to removed/redesign, it is also observe that there is also need for the hospital to deploy Electronic Health Record (EHR) to reduce error due to manual recording and reduce time response as well