Care pathway records and ontologies for medical research and healthcare

Abstract

This is one of a series of papers arising in part out of the SHARE (Supporting and structuring Healthgrid Activities and Research in Europe) project; in previous work, we have examined the use of integrated care pathways (ICPs), a fine-grained form of medical guideline including the explicit recording of any deviation, or ‘variance’, for research purposes. In particular, we explored how feeding the results of the analysis of variance into the development of a pathway might be an effective way of capturing ‘evidence from practice’. In our principal case study we propose a system for extracting data from ICPs using ontologies and a method for inferring ICPs from other patient records, combining these with data collected for retrospective and prospective studies in preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) for assisted reproduction. We also look at the problem of resolving drug interactions that may occur when patients follow multiple pathways in parallel, using an ontology for drug interactions in concert with a modified form of a generic care pathway ontology to give clinicians guidance on the optimal selection of drugs and necessary maintenance for dealing with compli

Total Document Downloads in Past 12 Months

Document Downloads

Total Document Downloads