Bio-medical Ontologies Maintenance and Change Management

270 J.Y. Chen, S. Taduri, and F. Lloyd
being able to control one’s finances everyday through online banking and
personal financial planning.
3 Framework Design
We show a novel design of a PHR information system framework which we call
Personal Health Office (PHO), based on our experience and analysis of existing
PHR systems. The PHO framework aims to enable patients manage their personal
health records that are pre-populated with their own EMRs retrieved from the
health care provider’s EMR systems. Using this design, the framework allows the
patients to gain access to their own sensitive EMR in a secure architecture outside
of the transactional databases of the hospitals, expedited by their physicians. The
framework also enables the extraction, transformation, and loading (ETL) of conventional
EMR data to interactive graphical charts and allows the patients to annotate
on the transformed data. Moreover, the framework provides secure and easy
online management of comprehensive PHR functions by the patients with health
blogs and notes on EMRs. The framework can be extended with many features
with standard web technology and robust relational database engine. Furthermore,
the framework gives health care service providers and physicians an opportunity
to validate transcription errors caught and corrected by patients themselves.
Lastly, the framework supports the extraction and integration of data from various
public sources such as hospital directories and physician directories in centralized
data repositories outside of the hospital EMR or personal PHR systems. An overall
design of this PHO architecture is shown in Fig. 1.
In our PHO framework (Fig. 1), public database contents (top left) and
personalized medical records (top right) are separately retrieved but combined
together. The public database contents include bulk downloaded information not
only including what is shown in the figure but also information such as physician
specialty database, drug database, drug saftey, and health tips, commonly in
various existing relational database formats. The persoanalized medical records
information from the service provider’s EMR information systems commonly take
the form of un-structured PHR documents. These documents can be retrieved
using automated bulk web content downloaders, web services, or web page
information extracting tools. The parsed PHR data can then be transformed into
chronological health events and loaded into the PHO database managed by Oracle
database mangement system (DBMS). Application modules such as the following
are then built to support various content presentations (charting, commenting, etc):
• Data Extraction, Loading and Transformation (ETL) Engine. At the
1st and information extraction layer, this module is responsible for
extracting information from document collections. It is used to extract the
data originally stored in EMR systems and public systems, transform into
various object representations in the PHO database.
• Relational DBMS engine. At the 2nd and database layer, this module is
used to manage the data and meta-data necessary for holding the personal
health event information. It also serves as a control system between
different PHO web system components.