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Research and Development of Semantics-based Sharable Clinical Pathway Systems

  • Transactional Processing Systems
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Abstract

The clinical pathway (CP) as a novel medical management schema is beneficial for reducing the length of stay, decreasing heath care costs, standardizing clinical activities, and improving medical quality. However, the practicability of CPs is limited by the complexity and expense of adding the standard functions of electronic CPs to existing electronic medical record (EMR) systems. The purpose of this study was to design and develop an independent clinical pathway (ICP) system that is sharable with different EMR systems. An innovative knowledge base pattern was designed with separate namespaces for global knowledge, local knowledge, and real-time instances. Semantic web technologies were introduced to support knowledge sharing and intelligent reasoning. The proposed system, which was developed in a Java integrated development environment, achieved standard functions of electronic CPs without modifying existing EMR systems and integration environments in hospitals. The interaction solution between the pathway system and the EMR system simplifies the integration procedures with other hospital information systems. Five categories of transmission information were summarized to ensure the interaction process. Detailed procedures for the application of CPs to patients and managing exceptional alerts are presented by explicit data flow analysis. Compared to embedded pathway systems, independent pathway systems feature greater feasibility and practicability and are more advantageous for achieving the normalized management of standard CPs.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation (Grant No. 61173127), National High-tech R&D Program (No. 2013AA041201, No. 2015AA020109) and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Engineering Research Center of EMR and Intelligent Expert System, Ministry of Education, Collaborative Innovation Center for Diagnosis and Treatment of Infectious Diseases, College of Biomedical Engineering and Instrument Science, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China

    Hua-Qiong Wang, Tian-Shu Zhou, Yi-Fan Zhang & Jing-Song Li

  2. Department of General Surgery, The Second Affiliated Hospital of Zhejiang University School of Medicine, Hangzhou, China

    Li Chen

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  1. Hua-Qiong Wang
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Correspondence to Jing-Song Li.

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This article is part of the Topical Collection on Transactional Processing Systems

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Wang, HQ., Zhou, TS., Zhang, YF. et al. Research and Development of Semantics-based Sharable Clinical Pathway Systems. J Med Syst 39, 73 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10916-015-0257-8

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