An Integrated Information Sharing Structure for Resuscitation Data

Every year more than 250000 people suffer from cardiac arrest in Europe. Survival rate to hospital discharge vary in the range 1.8-30.7%, indicating a potential for improvement by identifying explanatory factors. Ambulance charts documenting resuscitation efforts may be a natural starting point for such analysis, but data subject to analysis have to be comparable. Different data formats make common analysis difficult, and a standardised data format is required. In this paper we demonstrate how a common ontology can ease exchange of resuscitation data and how data can easily be converted to this format. Furthermore we show how queries and reasoning mechanisms can automatically integrate and combine data, a process that at prior had to be done manually.