Information Overload in Telemedicine: Using Complex Event Processing and Context for Intelligent Information Filtering and Supply

Today's central issues in the healthcare supply make it imperative to develop new concepts to reduce the emerging costs and ensure high quality standards. Applying information and communication technology (ICT) and especially telemedicine – technologies that offer the chance to optimize medical data transfer – is regarded as the promising strategy, when developing cost saving concepts. As a result, physicians, as recipients of medical data, are confronted with a growing amount of information, called information overload. Therefore information has to be transported according to the principles of information logistics (ILOG). This paper presents preliminary results of a new approach to use complex event processing (CEP) as a vehicle for information logistics processing termed as Telemedical ILOG Listener (TIL) using context to specify the users’ information need. Every telemedical value, like for instance blood-pressure, has to be described as a telemedical event on the basis of HL7 V3, a widespread international standard for data exchange in the healthcare sector. We will define a message type which is able to include the medical data, data necessary for CEP, context and at least data to represent the dimension of ILOG, so it can be processed by a TIL.