Ontological framework for standardizing and digitizing clinical pathways in healthcare information systems
Abstract
Most healthcare institutions are reorganizing their healthcare delivery systems based on Clinical Pathways (CPs). CPs are novel medical management plans to standardize medical activities, reduce cost, optimize resource usage, and improve the quality of service. However, most CPs are still paper-based and not fully integrated with Health Information Systems (HIS). More CP computerization research is therefore needed to fully benefit from CP's practical potentials. A major contribution of this research is the vision that CP systems deserve to be placed at the centre of HIS, because within CPs lies the very heart of medical planning, treatment and impressions, including healthcare quality and cost factors. An important contribution to the realization of this vision is to fully standardize and digitize CPs so that they become machine-readable and smoothly linkable across various HIS. To achieve this goal, this research proposes a framework for (i) CP knowledge representation and sharing using ontologies, (ii) CP standardization based on SNOMED CT and HL7, and (iii) CP digitization based on a novel coding system to encode CP data. To show the feasibility of the proposed framework we developed a prototype clinical pathway management ...Continue Reading
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