Design and Implementation of a Real Concept-Based EMR for the Heart Failure Patient Management

Barbara Purin, Claudio Eccher, Paolo Giardini, Manuela Rigo, Stefano Forti
Italy ITC-irst, Centre for Scientific and Technology Research, Trento, Italy

Abstract: The Electronic Medical Record (EMR) is the essential component of an integrated computer-based medical setting since it is used to store and manage patient health information. The purpose of this paper is to present a real application of a concept-based EMR for the heart failure patient management. The role of ontologies to allow a more effective data and knowledge sharing as well as to model and manage clinical information in a flexible and powerful way is widely recognized. Our approach is based on openEHR ontologies that allow us to build an interoperable, future-proof clinical information system. This work is part of the e-Heart Failure project funded by the Autonomous Province of Trento and started in June 2002.

Objectives: Health domain is huge and open-ended because of the constant evolution of the clinical information available from heterogeneous resources. Health information systems would have to be able to evolve over time according to the clinical knowledge changes. For these reasons Medicine has become one of the most active research area as regards the development of knowledge bases. The Electronic Medical Record (EMR) is the main component of an health information environment but it could have a too rigid structure if it is built ad hoc. Moreover, in order to enable reusing of existing knowledge bases and allow information sharing, especially over the web, we need knowledge integration methodologies and techniques so that complex and detailed concepts could be efficiently communicated. We try to approach these problems using ontologies.