Translating the Observational Medical Outcomes Partnership-Common Data Model (OMOP-CDM) Electronic Health Records to an OWL Ontology

Abstract

The heterogeneity of electronic health records model is a major problem: it is necessary to gather data from various models for clinical research, but also for clinical decision support. The Observational Medical Outcomes Partnership-Common Data Model (OMOP-CDM) has emerged as a standard model for structuring health records populated from various other sources. This model is proposed as a relational database schema. However, in the field of decision support, formal ontologies are commonly used. In this paper, we propose a translation of OMOP-CDM into an ontology, and we explore the utility of the semantic web for structuring EHR in a clinical decision support perspective, and the use of the SPARQL language for querying health records. The resulting ontology is available online.