Improving Emergency Healthcare Response using Real-Time Collaborative Technology

Harnessing geospatial technologies (GPS, GIS, internet mapping and remote sensing) can promote collaboration of humans, environmental, and healthcare resources-for real-time decision support in emergency healthcare scenarios. Oftentimes, high death rates are recorded by emergency rescue workers due to infrastructural deficit and sparsity of ambulatory services within the patients' location. Also, acute shortage of health personnel may pose great risk to patients requiring emergency healthcare services, as limited knowledge of healthcare data can prevent proactive, just-in-time response to emergency, and dearth of appropriate healthcare policies. This study therefore proposes a geospatial recommender framework that connects patients with healthcare providers and other relevant stakeholders; to exploit and filter in context, emergency healthcare information and knowledge-for enhanced response strategy that minimizes fatalities among patients. We examine case study data within the African context and discuss infrastructural challenges, opportunities and design implications, to demonstrate the feasibility of our framework. The immediate benefit of the framework is enhanced specialty care for home-bound patients or in emergency cases where distance appears prohibitive. Our strategy will certainly scale up complex healthcare interventions to large populations, as a new paradigm for evidence-based intervention with state-of-the-art technology for optimized services is guaranteed.