Integration of Health and Public Transport Data to Enable Decision Support for Seniors to Reduce Risk of Infection with Communicable Diseases

The ageing population puts challenges on countries worldwide. New concepts under the term Smart Cities are developed globally to face these challenges. The application of information and communication technology can be used as a driver for new innovative and more efficient processes supporting citizens in smart cities. An example is the optimization of everyday life processes like routine medical examinations of seniors during epidemic outbreaks like COVID-19. In this work we propose a novel standards-based IT system to enable evidence-based decision support for seniors, based on the integration of health and public transport data. The system supports seniors to take a safe path with the public transport in a smart city for their routine medical examinations during epidemic outbreaks like COVID-19. Furthermore, we describe the standardized integration of public transport data in the system as the first implementation step of the project. The requirements for the system were defined by a use case described through a sequence diagram, which was subsequently used to define the proposed system's IT architecture. As a first step of the prototype implementation, the integration of public transport data in the system was done using medical interoperability standards. Conformance tests were performed by applying the HL7 FHIR specification 3.0.1 through the official HL7 FHIR validator. The used standards could successfully be applied in the pilot. Semantic interoperability was supported through definition of code lists. The next steps of the prototype implementation include an update to HL7 FHIR 4.0.1 specification, the integration of the telemonitoring branch and the integration of the data from the Epidemiologic Reporting System based on HL7 FHIR.