Improving Cross-domain Information Sharing for Care Coordination using Semantic Web Technologies Spyros Kotoulas spyros.kotoulas@ie.ibm.com Vanessa Lopez vanlopez@ie.ibm.com Marco Luca Sbodio marco.sbodio@ie.ibm.com Pierpaolo Tommasi ptommasi@ie.ibm.com Martin Stephenson martin stephenson@ie.ibm.com Pol Mac Aonghusa aonghusa@ie.ibm.com Smarter Cities Technology Centre IBM Research Ireland ABSTRACT We present an approach to access and consolidate complex information spanning multiple specialist domains and make it available to non-experts. We are using a combination of business rules and contextual exploration to reduce interface complexity and improve consumability. We present a use case and a prototype on top of a real-world enterprise solution for coordinating Social care and Health care. We evaluate our system through a user study. Our results indicate that our approach reduces the time required to obtain business results compared to a baseline graph exploration approach. INTRODUCTION Healthcare and Social Care are unique domains in terms of economic magnitude and complexity. In economic terms, for 2009, total expenditure on healthcare in the United States was 2.6 trillion USD or 17.4% of the GDP 1 . Total expenditure on social care was 2.98 trillion USD or 19.90% of the GDP 2 . In terms of complexity, organizations that are involved in pro- viding social and health care are numerous and span a very wide domain (ranging from public safety to income support). For example, AHIP, the trade association of health insurers numbers some 1300 members 3 ; the number of hospitals reg- istered with the American Hospital Association is 5724 4 and the number of homeless shelters surpasses 4000 5 . In addi- tion, medical information is vastly complex: Nuance reports that LinkBase R 6 contains more than 1 million concepts. Coordinating Social Care and Health Care has been identi- fied both as a major pain point and a significant opportunity 1 http://dx.doi.org/10.1787/888932523215 2 http://www.oecd.org/els/social/expenditure 3 http://www.ahip.org 4 http://www.aha.org/research/rc/stat-studies/fast-facts.shtml, re- trieved 19/04/2013 5 http://www.shelterlistings.org/ 6 http://www.nuance.com/for-healthcare/resources/clinical- language-understanding/ontology/index.htm Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from permissions@acm.org. IUI’14, February 24–27, 2014, Haifa, Israel. Copyright is held by the owner/author(s). Publication rights licensed to ACM. ACM 978-1-4503-2184-6/14/02..$15.00. http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2557500.2557538 in modern health and social systems [12]. Several studies have shown that costs can be contained and outcomes im- proved with a more holistic approach to care [10]. As a sim- ple motivating example, consider an individual quartered in inappropriate housing while suffering from a relatively minor health issue, aggravated by the housing condition. As a result, the given individual frequently resorts to visiting emergency rooms, resulting in significant cost to the healthcare system and a less effective treatment. By itself, the housing situation does not warrant state intervention. Nevertheless, resolving it would dramatically improve the health situation, resulting in a better quality-of-life for the individual and lower costs for the health system. In this paper, we investigate the challenges presented in Care Coordination as a characteristic complex, multi-domain in- formation access problem space. We propose a novel techni- cal solution to augment applications with cross-domain con- text, based on an intelligent semantics-based user interface. Although we focus on the specific use-case, the approach pre- sented in this paper is applicable to any domain with similar characteristics (e.g. public safety). The main contribution of this paper lies in an abstract, standards-compliant and transferable definition of hybrid business rules and context-driven data exploration. Our ap- proach marries the usability of business rules with the flexi- bility, ability to represent abstract information and interoper- ability of Semantic technologies. We present a proof of concept on top of an enterprise solution for care management, IBM C´ uram. For privacy reasons, all personal information shown in this paper is fictional, although it has been retrieved from internal system deployments. This paper is an extension to the demo in [8], showing a user eval- uation and a more extensive description of the Vulnerability Indicators. BACKGROUND In this Section, we are giving an overview of the main char- acteristics, pain points, research efforts and technologies for the domains targeted in this paper. Healthcare is a very complex domain where numerous or- ganizations are involved during the care providing process: medical research institutes, hospitals, clinics, pharmaceuti- cal companies, nursing facilities, medical equipment man- ufactures etc. With the wide adoption of information tech-