An OWL Ontology for Modeling HL-7 Compliant Electronic Patient Records for Chronic Disease Management

Abstract

The management process of chronic diseases is longitudinal in nature. Patient records in electronic format provide information at the point of care and support decision-making processes. In our research, we analyzed the clinical pragmatics of Chronic Disease Management (CDM) and formulated a knowledge model to develop Ontology-based EMR. Our research involved knowledge abstraction, knowledge modeling, and ontology engineering. We applied the Knowledge Management approach to knowledge sources including medical literature, the Chronic Care Model (CCM), CPR Ontology and HL-7 RIM. We studied CDM in detail to abstract conceptual knowledge involved in the process of CDM. The abstracted knowledge was modeled into a formal model called CD-EMR Model. We adapted Methontology and developed an OWL-based ontology from the CD-EMR Model. We evaluated the ontology by instantiating longitudinal clinical cases of chronic diseases. CD-EMR ontology allows (a) computerization of longitudinal patient records, (b) semantic interoperability, and (c) reasoning for clinical decision support.