Construction and Application of Spatio-Temporal Database and Geography Information System for Emergency Medical Care (I)

In the past years, we have constructed a pilot surveillance system dedicated to monitoring capacity and capability of emergency medical care services in Kaohsing-Pingtung area. The advances in site-specific and time-related data collection, accomplished by computer-to-computer communication among affiliated hospitals, provide us a continuously increasing amount of big data on dynamic changes in regional emergency departments, intensive care units, and operation theaters. This explosive growth of geospatially-referenced databases has far outpaced the conventional planners’ perspective to analyze these big data when using basic data analytic techniques and geographic information system. There is an urgent need for new techniques to analyze emergency-care-related data with huge geographic information, while subsequently they also can transform the result into useful message and knowledge. Emergency medical care is time-sensitive that usually highlights the importance of getting right patients to right hospitals at right time. In order to improve the emergency medical care system and fulfill the analytical requirements, this project aims to develope an interactive analytical platform that incorporates appropriate geospatial visual analytics with data mining techniques, allows planners to examine institutional operational efficiency, dispatchs making a decision, and examines changes in quality of trauma care and enviromental and socioecomic status among catchment areas. Furthermore, this modular-designed approach can be adjustable and expandiable, according to needs among different diseases and acute settings.