Abstract:

This paper presents a decision support module that was implemented as part of a project in which a system was developed to support simulation exercises for sanitary services in order to improve procedures in the activities performed by sanitary supervision authorities in cases of digestive poisoning and food-borne infectious diseases. The system will be the basis for the organisation of simulation exercises for sanitary supervision authorities in the fight against potential digestive poisoning or food-borne infectious epidemics. The simulation exercises are intended to better prepare sanitary inspectors to combat digestive poisoning or food-borne disease epidemics and to improve the procedures used by sanitary supervision authorities. During and before an epidemiological investigation, sanitary services are faced with many decision-making situations. Support for making the right decisions quickly is provided by the decision support module developed in the project. An independent element are the developed models of processes, called the business processes, which describe the activities of the sanitation services in the region under consideration. They take into account not only the activities of sanitary inspectors directed at counter-epidemic activities, but also support the circulation of documents and elements of decision-making processes related to these activities. Based on the developed and implemented business processes, it is possible to support activities carried out by sanitary services. The system indicates to the sanitary inspector what actions should be performed in connection with the occurrence of a specific situation, such as the occurrence of a mass digestive poisoning. Based on the developed business process describing the course of an epidemiological investigation in the outbreak of the food-borne infectious disease, all activities carried out by sanitary services are supported by the system. The system guides the sanitary inspector by indicating which activities he should carry out at a given stage of the epidemiological investigation. In this way, the system simultaneously supports the decisions that are taken by the inspector during the epidemiological investigation. The design of the architecture of the emerging IT system has been developed. The project covers both the hardware architecture, i.e. the type of physical servers on which the system has been installed, and the architecture of the system software, i.e. database servers, external service servers and application servers.