SAPPHIRE (Health care)

Last updated February 19, 2019

The Situational Awareness and Preparedness for Public Health Incidences and Reasoning Engines (SAPPHIRE) is a semantics-based health information system capable of tracking and evaluating situations and occurrences that may affect public health. It was developed in 2004 by Dr. Parsa Mirhaji at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston using the Semantic Web technologies.

Semantics is the linguistic and philosophical study of meaning, in language, programming languages, formal logics, and semiotics. It is concerned with the relationship between signifiers—like words, phrases, signs, and symbols—and what they stand for in reality, their denotation.

Health informatics is information engineering applied to the field of health care, essentially the management and use of patient healthcare information. It is a multidisciplinary field that uses health information technology (HIT) to improve health care via any combination of higher quality, higher efficiency, and new opportunities. The disciplines involved include information science, computer science, social science, behavioral science, management science, and others. The NLM defines health informatics as "the interdisciplinary study of the design, development, adoption and application of IT-based innovations in healthcare services delivery, management and planning". It deals with the resources, devices, and methods required to optimize the acquisition, storage, retrieval, and use of information in health and bio-medicine. Health informatics tools include computers, clinical guidelines, formal medical terminologies, and information and communication systems, among others. It is applied to the areas of nursing, clinical medicine, dentistry, pharmacy, public health, occupational therapy, physical therapy, biomedical research, and alternative medicine, all of which are designed to improve the overall of effectiveness of patient care delivery by ensuring that the data generated is of a high quality.

The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth) was created in 1972 by The University of Texas System Board of Regents. UTHealth is located in Houston, Texas, in the Texas Medical Center, which is considered the largest medical center in the world. It is composed of six schools: John P. and Kathrine G. McGovern Medical School, The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center UTHealth Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences, UTHealth School of Dentistry, Cizik School of Nursing, UTHealth School of Biomedical Informatics and UTHealth School of Public Health.

Technology

SAPPHIRE is based upon developing Semantic Web technologies — a set of formats and programming languages (such as the Resource Description Framework language and the Web Ontology Language (OWL)) that find and analyze data on the World Wide Web to enable users to understand and utilize organized information online. ^[1]^:95 The system is used to gather, organize and impart information on important happenings and events, assisting public health-care professionals to prepare and act. It permits data to be interpreted distinctly, meeting the specific needs of diverse industries, users and disciplines rather than a generalized, universal format. The SAPPHIRE system was developed by the Health Science Center using the RDF technologies developed by Oracle, Inc. and TopQuadrant, Inc.^[2]

The Semantic Web is an extension of the World Wide Web through standards by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The standards promote common data formats and exchange protocols on the Web, most fundamentally the Resource Description Framework (RDF). According to the W3C, "The Semantic Web provides a common framework that allows data to be shared and reused across application, enterprise, and community boundaries". The Semantic Web is therefore regarded as an integrator across different content, information applications and systems.

The Resource Description Framework (RDF) is a family of World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) specifications originally designed as a metadata data model. It has come to be used as a general method for conceptual description or modeling of information that is implemented in web resources, using a variety of syntax notations and data serialization formats. It is also used in knowledge management applications.

The Web Ontology Language (OWL) is a family of knowledge representation languages for authoring ontologies. Ontologies are a formal way to describe taxonomies and classification networks, essentially defining the structure of knowledge for various domains: the nouns representing classes of objects and the verbs representing relations between the objects. Ontologies resemble class hierarchies in object-oriented programming but there are several critical differences. Class hierarchies are meant to represent structures used in source code that evolve fairly slowly whereas ontologies are meant to represent information on the Internet and are expected to be evolving almost constantly. Similarly, ontologies are typically far more flexible as they are meant to represent information on the Internet coming from all sorts of heterogeneous data sources. Class hierarchies on the other hand are meant to be fairly static and rely on far less diverse and more structured sources of data such as corporate databases.

Function

SAPPHIRE helps track specific incidences such as the spread and treatment of influenza, AIDS and related information. The system frequently gathers information from select public hospitals, emergency services and care providers and their electronic health records and information provided by medical professionals. ^[1]^:95 The information is integrated and categorized - flu-related symptoms are analyzed for trends that may indicate probabilities of flu epidemics. Such data is transmitted to institutions such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. SAPPHIRE's processes have also reduced the administrative burdens and inefficiencies at hospitals and clinics. ^[1]^:95

Influenza, commonly known as the flu, is an infectious disease caused by an influenza virus. Symptoms can be mild to severe. The most common symptoms include: high fever, runny nose, sore throat, muscle pains, headache, coughing, sneezing, and feeling tired. These symptoms typically begin two days after exposure to the virus and most last less than a week. The cough, however, may last for more than two weeks. In children, there may be diarrhea and vomiting, but these are not common in adults. Diarrhea and vomiting occur more commonly in gastroenteritis, which is an unrelated disease and sometimes inaccurately referred to as "stomach flu" or the "24-hour flu". Complications of influenza may include viral pneumonia, secondary bacterial pneumonia, sinus infections, and worsening of previous health problems such as asthma or heart failure.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is the leading national public health institute of the United States. The CDC is a United States federal agency under the Department of Health and Human Services and is headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia.

Usage after Hurricane Katrina

The University of Houston conducted a pilot test of SAPPHIRE in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in the fall of 2005, which devastated the populations and infrastructures of southern Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama and Texas. Implemented swiftly within hours of mass evacuations, the SAPPHIRE system successfully monitored and analyzed public health information for the usage of government officials and services, who feared outbreaks of epidemics. Officials used hand-held computers to gather data from the evacuees and transmit directly to the SAPPHIRE database. ^[1]^:96 SAPPHIRE was specifically used to analyze the health of the evacuees at the Astrodome, Reliant Park and the George R. Brown Convention Center.^[2] A PDA extension of SAPPHIRE enabled more than 300 volunteers, led by the UT School of Public Health, to collect and analyze critical health data. SAPPHIRE gathered information from nearly 9,000 confidential patient cases of the past to help services respond to the specific needs of the evacuees, helping to identify environment-specific vulnerabilities, prevalence and conditions for diseases and epidemics.^[2] SAPPHIRE was recorded to have assisted in identifying outbreaks of gastrointestinal, respiratory diseases and conjunctivitis much sooner than previously possible.^[1]^:96

Hurricane Katrina was an extremely destructive and deadly Category 5 hurricane that made landfall on Florida and Louisiana, particularly the city of New Orleans and the surrounding areas, in August 2005, causing catastrophic damage from central Florida to eastern Texas. Subsequent flooding, caused largely as a result of fatal engineering flaws in the flood protection system known as levees around the city of New Orleans, precipitated most of the loss of lives. The storm was the third major hurricane of the record-breaking 2005 Atlantic hurricane season, as well as the fourth-most intense Atlantic hurricane on record to make landfall in the United States, behind only the 1935 Labor Day hurricane, Hurricane Camille in 1969, and Hurricane Michael in 2018.

Mississippi is a state located in the southeastern region of the United States. Mississippi is the 32nd most extensive and 34th most populous of the 50 United States. It is bordered by Tennessee to the north, Alabama to the east, the Gulf of Mexico and Louisiana to the south, and Arkansas and Louisiana to the west. The state's western boundary is largely defined by the Mississippi River. Jackson, with a population of approximately 175,000 people, is both the state's capital and largest city.

Louisiana is a state in the Deep South region of the South Central United States. It is the 31st most extensive and the 25th most populous of the 50 United States. Louisiana is bordered by the state of Texas to the west, Arkansas to the north, Mississippi to the east, and the Gulf of Mexico to the south. A large part of its eastern boundary is demarcated by the Mississippi River. Louisiana is the only U.S. state with political subdivisions termed parishes, which are equivalent to counties. The state's capital is Baton Rouge, and its largest city is New Orleans.

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References

1 2 3 4 5 Feigenbaum, Lee; Herman, Ivan; Hongsermeier, Tonya; Neumann, Eric; Stephens, Susie; et al. (December 2007). "The Semantic Web In Action". Scientific American . 297 (6): 90–97. doi:10.1038/scientificamerican1207-90. PMID 18237102.
1 2 3 "University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston Deploys Public Health Preparedness Framework with Oracle and TopQuadrant" (Press release). Oracle. 19 February 2007. Archived from the original on 14 May 2008.

External links

The KnowMED Incorporation
Parsa Mirhaji at Academia.edu .

Academia.edu is an American social networking website for academics. The platform can be used to share papers, monitor their impact, and follow the research in a particular field. It was launched in September 2008, with 39 million unique visitors per month as of January 2019 and over 21 million uploaded texts. Academia.edu was founded by Richard Price, who raised $600,000 from Spark Ventures, HOWZAT Partners, Brent Hoberman, and others.

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[SA2-1] 1 2 3 4 5 Feigenbaum, Lee; Herman, Ivan; Hongsermeier, Tonya; Neumann, Eric; Stephens, Susie; et al. (December 2007). "The Semantic Web In Action". Scientific American . 297 (6): 90–97. doi:10.1038/scientificamerican1207-90. PMID 18237102.

[O-2] 1 2 3 "University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston Deploys Public Health Preparedness Framework with Oracle and TopQuadrant" (Press release). Oracle. 19 February 2007. Archived from the original on 14 May 2008.