A Service-oriented Framework for Developing Personalized Patient Care Plans for COVID-19

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has identified weaknesses and stresses in the existing healthcare and governance system, even in the most developed countries. Given the scale and scope of the pandemic, existing healthcare systems are heavily resource constrained, and home-based isolation has been considered as a potential first step for reducing both the disease spread and the stress on the healthcare system. However, the needs and requirements of home-based isolation are extremely unique for each patient, depending on their medical condition and comorbidities, family responsibilities, and environmental constraints. Therefore, it is necessary to develop personalized patient care plans to ensure that the needs of each patient are appropriately met. In this paper we propose a service oriented framework that allows dynamic composition and management of such plans assuming existence of an appropriate knowledge base and availability of web-services interfaces of the underlying systems of caregivers and service providers. We develop a prototype implementation to show the feasibility of the proposed framework and discuss the challenges/issues in deploying such a system in practice.

Keywords: Interoperability; Knowledge-centric workflows; Personalized patient care plans; Web services.

Figure 1:

Framework for management of personalized patient care plans

Figure 2:

Examples of some of the standard care activities for a self-isolated COVID-19 patient requiring weekly dialysis

Figure 3:

(a) Initial state computed from patient’s profile attributes (b) Goal state computed from selected patient care activities

Figure 4:

Prototype System Implementation