A linked data approach to care coordination

Abstract

The success of a society is often judged by its ability to support the most vulnerable. Supporting the most vulnerable individuals is extremely challenging from an information needs perspective, since it requires data from numerous domains and systems, including Social Care, Healthcare, Public Safety and Juridical systems. Information sharing on this scale gives rise to scientific and technical challenges with regard to data representation, access, integration and retrieval granularity. This is a practice-oriented paper presenting a Linked Data-based approach that is uniquely positioned to access and surface information across domains and data sources using a combination of vulnerability indexes and contextual exploration. We apply this approach on a set of enterprise systems from IBM to develop an information sharing architecture and prototype for Care Coordination with a focus on Social Care and Healthcare. We report on expert feedback and user studies that indicate that our approach indeed reduces the time required to gain some business insight while maintaining the flexibility of a Linked Data-based integration approach. © 2014 ACM.