Adaptive Clinical Pathway Using Semantic Web

Abstract

Internship report - Winter 2005 It is commonly believed that the quality of healthcare can be improved by taking advantage of the latest medical knowledge and best practices. This is especially true when designing clinical pathway. A clinical pathway is a multidisciplinary plan of best clinical practice for specified groups of patient with a particular diagnosis. One of the difficulties is how to apply the best practice, for example clinical guideline when drawing the pathway. Another difficulty is clinical pathway should be flexible and in response to the change in the real world. In this report, a method using semantic web technology is proposed by Agfa research group. The medical knowledge will be captured in a semantic model and a rule-based inference engine is used to infer the clinical pathway. I worked on this ACW project in Agfa Inc. during my internship. In this report, I describe the works done in this period, including practice with BPEL process, review of clinical pathway and first demonstration of the ACW project. At the end of the report, another thought of adaptive clinical pathway and some recommendations for the future work are introduced.