Bio-medical Ontologies Maintenance and Change Management

274 J.Y. Chen, S. Taduri, and F. Lloyd
patients—that drives up cost; instead, they can be relieved from HIPAA patient
consenting paperwork, medical information filtering, and medical-error related
liabilities. The physicians can also take a central role in efficient patient selfeducation,
record review, and guided medical assessment—all contributing to the
improving the quality of the services offered.
We break down the functional interactions based on three user types: patients,
physicians, and web administrators. They interact with the PHO software in
different ways described as the following.
• Patient Functions. Patients could gain priviledged access to the PHO web
system (Logon), view the status of the requests submitted to the physician
(Show Request Status), request access permission to his/her own records
stoared in the hospital‘s EMR (Request Access), view personal profile
information such as name, date of birth, current medications, and allergy
information (Access Profile), view their personal health record linked to
EMR after physician approval (Access PHR), add comments and timestamps
of such comments to health records collected from different hospital record
systems (Annotate PHR), view and add his daily health online blogs (Add
Daily Health Blog), and locate his physician in order to request access
permission online or schedule follow-up visits/consultation sessions (Local
Physicians).
• Physician Functions. Physicians could gain access to the PHO web system
and remote hospital EMR web access (Logon), use his hospital access
priviledge to grant or reject access permissions to patients who requests
access to their own records permissions (Grant/Deny Access), review patient
PHR that provides a different view of patient PHR from the traditional
hospital EMR (Review Patient PHR), review patient’s shared health event
annotations to help improve their in-hospital health care (Review Patient
Annotations), update their contact information (Update Contact Info), and
communicate with patients for clinical trial information (Send Clinical
Trials)
• Web Administrator Functions. They can load patient basic information
database from different sources into the standalone PHO online system
(Register Patient), load physician directory and specialty information
database into the standalone PHO online system (Register Physician),
associates each patient with the designated physician based on the patient’s
health care provider information retrieved by his hospital EMR (Match
Patient-Physician), and manage hospital EMR description including data
format and source link (Save Hospital Profiles).
5 Prototyping and Case Study
We present a case study to show how the new framework design could be implemented
as a research prototype to guide future large-scale implementations. To do
so, we introduce a hypothetical patient, Henry Wayne, a diabetic patient of hypothetical
physician Dr. Alexander Anthony at a hospital. Alexander’s medical