Social and environmental determinants of health (SEDoH) are crucial for achieving a holistic understanding of patient health. In fact, geographic factors may have more influence on health outcomes than patients’ genetics. Integrating SEDoH into the electronic health record (EHR), however, poses notable technical and compliance-related challenges. We evaluated barriers to the integration of SEDoH in the EHR and developed a privacy-preserving strategy to mitigate risk of protected health information exposure. Using coded identifiers for patient addresses, the strategy evaluates an alternative approach to ensure efficient, secure geocoding of data while preserving privacy throughout the data enrichment processes from numerous SEDoH data sources.

Pilot briefings, in their traditional form, drown pilots in a sea of information. Rather than unfocused swathes of air traffic management (ATM) information, pilots require only the information for their specific flight, preferably with an emphasis on the most important information. In this paper, we introduce the notion of ATM information cubes – in analogy to the well-established concept of Online analytical processing (OLAP) cubes in data warehousing. We propose a framework with merge and abstraction operations for the combination and summarization of the information in ATM information cubes to obtain management summaries of relevant information. To this end, we adopt the concept of semantic data container – a package of data items with a semantic description of the contents. The semantic descriptions then serve to hierarchically organise semantic containers along the dimensions of an ATM information cube. Leveraging this hierarchical organisation, a merge operation combines ATM information from individual semantic containers and collects the data items into composite containers. An abstraction operation summarises the data items within a semantic container, replacing individual data items with more abstract data items with summary information.