An Ontology-Based Electronic Medical Record for Chronic Disease Management

Abstract

Effective chronic disease management ensures better treatment and reduces medical costs. Representing knowledge through building an ontology for Electronic Medical Records (EMRs) is important to achieve semantic interoperability among healthcare information systems and to better execute decision support systems. In this thesis, an ontology-based EMR focusing on Chronic Disease Management is proposed. The W3C Computer-based Patient Record ontology [32] is customized and augmented with concepts and attributes from the Western Health Infostructure Canada chronic disease management model [27] and the American Society for Testing and Materials International EHR. The result is an EMR ontology capable of representing knowledge about chronic disease. All of the clinical actions of the proposed ontology were found to map to HL7 RIM classes. Such an EMR ontology for chronic disease management can support reasoning for clinical decision support systems as well as act as a switching language from one EMR standard to another for chronic disease knowledge.