This paper seeks to break down how a large scale Electronic Health Records system could improve quality of care and reduce monetary waste in the healthcare system. The paper further explores issues regarding regulations to data exchange and data interoperability. Due to the massive size of healthcare data, the exponential increase in the speed of data generation through innovative technologies, and the complexity of healthcare data types, the widespread of a large-scale EHR system has hit barriers. Much of the data available is unstructured or contained within a singular healthcare provider’s systems. To fully utilize all the data available, methods for making data interoperable and regulations for data exchange to protect and support patients must be made. Through angles addressing data exchange and interoperability, we seek to break down the constraints and issues that EHR systems still face and gain an understanding of the regulatory landscape.

Recent, and ongoing, research has been addressing the general problem of representing complex human activities for the purpose to provide intelligent software agents with a way to identify, reason, and evaluate human activities. Reliable evaluation of complex human activities requires the intelligent agent to obtain a representation that comprises distinguishing features of an activity. This is a challenging task, since a person´s activity is driven by goals, motives, and norms that may be conflicting in a situation. In order to provide knowledge about human activities to an intelligent software agent, we require tools that can allow us modeling human activities enabling knowledge elicitation. This study has evaluated a software prototype of a graphical modeling language with the overall research question to find the minimum language elements required to elicit the knowledge of activities from a domain expert. Eight participants tested the prototype through think aloud usability sessions were their understanding of the structure of the language was tested. Qualitative data analysis was conducted using a Grounded theory approach, which validity has been discussed. The findings indicated that characteristics of the hierarchical structure of Activity Theory are a supportive theoretical framework for the graphical language that resembles the way occupational therapists reason when analyzing human activities. The study proposes a set of minimum elements for the graphical language. A focus a for future study is to target the intelligent software system to further expand and tune the language by the systems requirements. / Pågående forskning har tagit upp det generella problemet med att representera komplexa mänskliga aktiviteter för att tillhandahålla intelligenta mjukvaruagenter med ett sätt att identifiera, resonera och utvärdera mänskliga aktiviteter. Tillförlitlig utvärdering av komplexa mänskliga aktiviteter kräver att den intelligenta agenten erhåller en representation med definierande särdrag hos aktiviteten. Det är en svår uppgift då en persons aktiviteter drivs av mål, motiv och normer som kan vara motstridiga i en situation. För att kunna ge kunskap om mänskliga aktiviteter till en intelligent mjukvaruagent behöver vi verktyg som kan tillåta oss att modellera mänskliga aktiviteter. Denna studie har utvärderat en prototyp av ett grafiskt modelleringsspråk där den övergripande forskningsfrågan var att hitta minsta antalet modelleringskomponenter som krävs för att representera kunskapen om aktiviteter från en domänexpert. Åtta deltagare testade prototypen genom användbarhetstester med tänka högt metodik där deras förståelse av språkets struktur testades. Grundad teori avändes för att analysera den kvalitativa datan. Validitet har diskuterats. Resultaten visade att den hierarkiska strukturen hos Activity theory är en stödjande teoretisk grund för det grafiska språket som liknar hur arbetsterapeuterna resonerar när de analyserar mänskliga aktiviteter. Studien föreslår minsta antalet modelleringskomponenter som krävs för det grafiska språket. Ett fokus för framtida studier är att rikta in sig på det intelligenta mjukvarusystemet för att ytterligare expandera och justera språket efter agentens krav och hitta en komplexitetsnivå i språket som båda parter kan förstå.

Approved for public release, distribution is unlimited / Singapore and many parts of Asia were hit with Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) in March 2003. The spread of SARS lead to a rapidly deteriorating and chaotic situation. Because SARS was a new infection, there was no prior knowledge that could be referenced to tackle such a complex, unknown and rapidly changing problem. Fortunately, through sound measures coupled with good leadership, quick action and inter-agency cooperation, the situation was quickly brought under control. This thesis uses the SARS incident as a case study to identify a set of network centric warfare methodologies and technologies that can be leveraged to facilitate the understanding and management of complex and rapidly changing situations. The same set of methodologies and technologies can also be selectively reused and extended to handle other situations in asymmetric and unconventional warfare. / Office of Force Transformation, DoD US Future Systems Directorate, MINDEF Singapore. / Lieutenant, Republic of Singapore Army / Civilian, Defence Science and Technology Agency, Singapore

Building Information Modelling (BIM) has the potential to become a technology which will help to use a holistic information repository to generate and represent relevant information in different building life-cycle stages (BLCS) to dedicated groups of stakeholders. However, the scope of model components of BIM data (e.g., IFC meta-data) is limited and some parts of it are not modelled in a manner that supports the diversity of engineering use cases. This paper aims to address this deficit by identifying the capability to formulate inference rules as one of the major benefits in the ontology-based information modelling approach. However, before one can formulate inferencing rules a detailed and in-depth understanding is required on how stakeholder information needs are defined in different BLCS and on how available, open-BIM meta-data models support these information requirements. Therefore, the research progressed initially on existing definitions for Level of Detail (LOD) and selected process-modelling standards (BLCS). In the subsequent part, different renovation Activities and the Stakeholder involvements are analysed. Use cases are defined and used as a grouping mechanism for selected scenarios. Based on these grouping mechanisms, a methodology of how components of a BIMmodel could be classified to support automated inferencing in the future. The outcome of this research is an established 6-dimensional intercommunication framework (LOD, BLS, Scenarios, Stakeholders, Use Cases, BIM model data) based on the Linked Building Data approach and focusing on renovation processes optimization. Based on the framework, a renovation Product-Process Modelling ontology is developed to connect existing components and to support new interoperable applications.:Abstract 1 Introduction and Backgroung 2 Renovation Framework 2.1 Level of Detail (LOD) 2.2 Building Life-Cycle Stage 2.3 Activity and Stakeholder 2.4 BIM Object (Product Information) 2.5 Use Cases 3 Product-Process Ontology 3.1 Activity – BIM Data – LOD 3.2 BLCS – Activity – Stakeholder 4 Validation 5 Conclusion 6 Future Work References