Learning to Generate an Ontology-Based Nursing Care Plan by Virtual Collaboration

Abstract

We describe how a web-based collaboration system is used to generate a document by referring ontology within a specific subject area. We have chosen nursing science as the target subject area as the nurses collaboratively plan and apply necessary treatments to the patients. The planning process involves coming up with a set of decisions and activities to perform according to the knowledge embedded in the nursing subject ontology. The nurses copiously record the patient conditions, which they observed, and also the ensuing reasoning outcome in the form of the diagnoses. Nursing care plan is a representative document, which is generated during the application of nursing processes. The plan includes general patient information, medical history, one or more goals of the nursing care plan, nursing diagnoses, expected outcomes of the care, and possible nursing interventions. We are developing a collaborative nursing care plan generation system, where several nurses can record and update the collected factual information about the patients and then come up with the most appropriate nursing diagnoses, outcomes, and interventions. The nursing care plan generation system is designed to double as a learning aid in order for the nurses by allowing them to observe what others do during the plan generation process. Eventually, the nurses are expected to share the same semantics of each ontology as they repeat the ontology-based decision makings.

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