2015 / Artigos Científicos

An Enhanced Architecture for LARIISA: An Intelligent System for Decision Making and Service Provision for e-Health using the cloud

Abstract: Health care services can be scarce and expensive in some countries and especially in isolated regions. The lack of information can degrade health care services, for example, by ineffective resource allocation or failure in epidemiological prediction. This paper proposes an architecture for system of decision making and service provisioning in the health care context. It encompasses and integrates data produced by environmental sensors installed in the assisted homes, medical data sets, domainspecific and semantic enriched data sets, and all data generated and collected in applications installed on mobile phones, wearable devices, desktops, web servers, and smart television. LARIISA architecture is presented as a platform to manage, provide and launch services that monitor and analyze data to supply relevant information to decision makers and health care actors that participate in the health care supply chain

2015 / Artigos Científicos

Health-system reform and universal health coverage in Latin America

Abstract: Starting in the late 1980s, many Latin American countries began social sector reforms to alleviate poverty, reduce socioeconomic inequalities, improve health outcomes, and provide financial risk protection. In particular, starting in the 1990s, reforms aimed at strengthening health systems to reduce inequalities in health access and outcomes focused on expansion of universal health coverage, especially for poor citizens. In Latin America, health-system reforms have produced a distinct approach to universal health coverage, underpinned by the principles of equity, solidarity, and collective action to overcome social inequalities. In most of the countries studied, government financing enabled the introduction of supply-side interventions to expand insurance coverage for uninsured citizens—with defined and enlarged benefits packages—and to scale up delivery of health services. Countries such as Brazil and Cuba introduced tax-financed universal health systems. These changes were combined with demand-side interventions aimed at alleviating poverty (targeting many social determinants of health) and improving access of the most disadvantaged populations. Hence, the distinguishing features of health-system strengthening for universal health coverage and lessons from the Latin American experience are relevant for countries advancing universal health coverage.

2015 / Artigos Científicos

Evolving an Intelligent Framework for Decision- Making Process in e-Health Systems

Abstract: This paper presents improvements of LARIISA, a framework that makes use of context-aware information to support decision-making and governance in the public health area. More specifically, two relevant e-health applications are presented to illustrate the LARIISA system. The first one uses Bayesian networks in dengue scenarios. The second application uses ontology to manage home care scenarios. In both cases, the contributions related to the LARIISA framework include patient health diagnosis provided remotely, support for decision-making health systems, and context information for context-aware health systems.