During the teleconference before last we had decided to take a
first shot at a W3C note on the problem statement for computer-based
patient records. I had preferred that we develop literature with guidance
towards solutions in this space as I think the problem statement is well
defined (at least with regards to the functional requirements needed to
support healthcare and life sciences). It seems to me that best practices
and the development of vocabularies to provide guidance to others in our
community is one of the core tenants of our charter.
I think if there is a challenge in this regard it is the development of
uniform core vocabularies that span 'from the bench to the bedside' in
concert with our efforts to demonstrate bench to bedside solutions - not
so much the problem statement in general. By uniform vocabularies
I don't mean a patchwork usage of ontologies that
model biomedical reality but have little to no connection to
patient-oriented healthcare information. I also think we can go a step
further from conccneus that HL7 RIM (as an OWL ontology) has well-known
ontological issues. The availablity of well established foundational
ontologies (both within and across domains) reduces the problem to an
exercise in ontology engineering at most (IMHO). It seems to me that
concensus in this regard is long.
So, for some time I've been developing (essentially) a foundational
ontology for patient medical records which uses the Problem-oriented
Medical Record model as a guide for how concepts in the realm of
healthcare information (well modelled by HL7 RIM) can be grounded in both
a domain-agnostic foundational ontology (DOLCE) as well as foundational
ontologies for clinical terminology (GALEN) - both of which are freely
available. In addition, I took the oppurtunity to attempt to resolve some
of the well articulated ontological failings of HL7 RIM (by being explicit
about the concept of the action of recording clinical information and the
phenomena being described by such recordings).
I've put up a Wiki that attempts to capture the motivation and rational
for the ontology as well as links to the vocabularies that were used.
There is also a link to the OWL / Protege files as well.
Best case scenario, I'm hoping the interest group adopts it as a
foundation for expressing concepts from the realm of patient medical
records (as an alternative to using HL7 RIM OWL exports as such a
foundation). Otherwise, I'm hoping to at least facilitate some
conversation on how we can contribute towards some concensus on medical
record vocabularies through the use of OWL and foundational ontologies -
since such a contribution falls squarely under our charter.
http://esw.w3.org/topic/HCLS/POMROntology
Chimezie Ogbuji
Lead Systems Analyst
Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery
Cleveland Clinic Foundation
9500 Euclid Avenue/ W26
Cleveland, Ohio 44195
Office: (216)444-8593
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
