A semantic clinical knowledge representation framework for effective health care risk management

Abstract

A process-oriented vision of clinical practices may allow to enhance patient safety by enabling better risks management capabilities. In the field of clinical information systems less attention has been paid to approaches aimed at reducing risks and errors by integrating both declarative and procedural aspects of medical knowledge. This work describes a semantic clinical knowledge representation framework that allows representing and managing, in a unified way, both medical knowledge and clinical processes and supports execution of clinical process taking into account risk handling. Framework features are presented by using a running example inspired by the clinical process adopted for caring breast neoplasm in the oncological ward of an Italian hospital. The example shows how the proposed framework can contribute to reduce risks. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.