Improving knowledge management in patient safety reporting: A semantic web ontology approach

Abstract

Patient safety reporting system is in an imperative need for reducing and learning from medical errors. Presently, a great number of the reporting systems are suffering low quality of data and poor system performance associated with data quality. For improving the quality of data and the system performance towards reducing harm in healthcare, we introduce an ontological approach with the scope of establishing a comprehensive knowledgebase. A semantic web ontology plays a crucial role to facilitate the knowledge transformation ranging from human-to-computer data entry to computer-tohuman knowledge retrieval. The paper describes the theoretical foundation, design, implementation, and evaluation of the prototype ontology. Based on W3C open standard Web Ontology Language (OWL), the proposed ontology was designed and implemented in Protégé 4.3. We envision that utilizing semantic web ontology would serve as a uniformed knowledgebase facilitating information retrieval and clinical decision making.