SIREPH: an Integrated Approach to the Pre-Hospital Emergency Framework

• Autor(a) principal: Pereira, João Filipe Martins
• Data de Publicação: 2022
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.26/42955
• topic: Emergency Management; Low-Code Development; Service Oriented Architecture; Software Engineering; Gestão de Emergência; Desenvolvimento em Low Code; Orientada para Serviços; Engenharia de Software

Pre-hospital emergency care is one of the most important phases in the healthcare system framework, as it is the first point of contact between patients and healthcare professionals. In Portugal, there is still a considerable amount of human dependent processes that could be automated to avoid unnecessary miscommunication and to improve the quality of the service provided. The main areas of challenge lie on the communication between emergency centrals, between emergency centrals and the technician’s on the field and in the patient pre-hospital emergency information handover phase to the target hospital. As these interactions take place in environments where time is essential and the pos sibility of committing errors is considerable, relying exclusively on human processes may hinder the entire framework. This thesis presents the analysis, design and implemen tation of a proof of concept solution that tackles the deficiencies identified in process automation in the pre-hospital emergency framework, and aims to improve the service quality provided by the professionals in this field. The system follows a service-oriented architecture, were a REST API supports several user interfaces. All web-based interfaces are implemented with a low code platform. This thesis is focused on 3 main distinguishable actors: administrative emergency centrals (emergency dispatch centers at national level); non-administrative emergency centrals (firefighter and red cross stations); and hospitals. We conducted trials with 25 users to validate the reliability of the system, particularly of the API, and the suitability of the user interfaces. Results show that the system accu rately captures the pre-hospital emergency information workflow, and the several user interfaces were positively reviewed by all users.