WWW/Internet - Portal do Software Público Brasileiro

IADIS International Conference WWW/Internet 2010AN OWL BASED ELECTRONIC HEALTH RECORDSUPPORTING EVIDENCE BASED MEDICINELukas Gerhold*, Hilal Tekoglu**, Markus Dorn*** and Michael Binder**Department of Dermatology, Division of General Dermatology, Medical University of Vienna**Coordinating Center for Clinical Trials, Medical University of Vienna***Faculty of Informatics, Technical University of ViennaABSTRACTAppling evidence based medicine (EBM) and good clinical practice (GCP) in daily practice enhance the quality of healthcare enormously. Checklists and guidelines help reducing medical malpractice significantly. A way to use checklists andguidelines is to integrate this information into medical documentation. Although some hospital information systemsalready support physicians with interactive IT support the use of EBM, structured, standardized electronic medicaldocumentation is still very limited. Electronic health records facilitate medical documentation.Electronic health records are designed for exchanging patient information between institutions and systems. The aim ofthis work is to show a way how electronic health records can be embedded into a comprehensive medical documentationfor providing relations between patient information and decision- or treatment processes.Ambitious attempts have been done defining structures and models for electronic health records (EHR) facilitatingsemantic interoperability between electronic health records - and electronic patient record systems. One of them is theISO 13606 EHR communication standard.The Web Ontology Language (OWL) was developed for defining and structuring data semantically. OWL enables higherlevels of abstraction and expressiveness for defining models than relational database schemata can. Furthermore we useda transformation of the ISO 13606-archetype model to OWL. We introduce an ontology driven application model. Theontology driven application model describes how to derive functionality from ontology knowledge dynamically andusing it for application behavior. Furthermore we introduce an application layout that implements the ontology drivenapplication model. We realized a generic implementation being compliant with the ISO 13606 EHR communicationstandard, to capture standardized electronic health records.This work demonstrates how to use ontologies for developing a semantic web application, and finally proves theintroduced models and methods through presenting a prototype.KEYWORDSSemantic interoperability, electronic health records, OWL1. INTRODUCTIONEvidence based medicine (EBM) aims to provide the best available evidence for medical decision makinggained from scientific methods (Timmermans and Mauck 2005). It aims to assess the strength of evidence ofthe benefits and risks of treatments and diagnostic tests (Elstein 2004). A systematic way to apply EBM inpractice is by defining guidelines and checklists which represent the medical knowledge. Through theserepresentations physicians are guided through the decision or treatment process. Although applying EBM isquite common during the medical treatment and decision processes, there is hardly any standardised ITsupport.In the past several years many approaches have been appeared to support semantic interoperability for thecommunication of medical patient records (MPR) and electronic health records (EHR). Many complexcomputer models were developed, like HL7v.3 Reference Information Model (HL7), ISO 13606Communication Standard (ISO 2008) or openEHR (Beale 2000). Their aim is to structure medicalinformation formally, unambiguously and standardized to facilitate the exchange of health informationbetween diverse systems behind the scenes. Even more, as medical research advances, the information needsincrease or change; one major benefit of these standards is to easily adapt to new medical information333