Bio-medical Ontologies Maintenance and Change Management

278 J.Y. Chen, S. Taduri, and F. Lloyd
Fig. 8. User Interface for Physician to Choose Patients who Shares PHR with him/her
study patient medical lab tests and take appropriate decisions on prescribing new
tests for the disease that the patient is diagnosed for. Another component is to
facilitate broadcast of clinical trial messages to all the patients of the physician.
In Fig. 8, we show an example user interface to select a patient from a physician’s
account. After the physician clicks on the “View Charts” button, the system
displays the same sets of charts and tables, except that physician’s view is
read-only.
6 Discussion
The physician-mediated personal health office software system is a new method,
which aims to benefit patients, physicians, and information technology
administrators significantly with the help of PHO software agents. The PHO
software agents can help integrate public health data with individual’s medical
data from EMRs and personal health history data. The system has built-in security
and access control, with robust relational database management system in the
backend, and secure web server applications in the frontend. With physician as
mediator, especially when future PHO applications are integrated with physician’s
daily information management (including email), the small overhead can translate
into potentially huge gains for patients, who are excited about managing PHR and
EMR together, understanding their own health problems better, and being able to
self-care outside of the hospital confinements.
Adopting and enforcing accepted standards is an important topic not addressed
here. This requires first and foremost the development of a complete data model
for representing the structure of the domain covered in this applicaiton. For
example, there should be a many-many relationship between patients and
physicians as it exists in real world. With this feature, if a patient’s access request
is delayed or unfairly denied by one physician, the patient would be able to
request another physician to view health information pertaining to a different
category. Also important is the mapping of medical terms from different hospitals,
patients, and their EMRs/PHRs onto the presentation layer using standards such as
the UMLS [8].
To make the prototype increasingly significant and useful, we would be
transferring the concepts, design models, and prototype programming codes into
the Open Source community. It is necessary that the community of developers are
involved in this project. We believe the sharing and social networking potential of