Improving Knowledge Management in Patient Safety Reporting: A Semantic Web Ontology Approach

Conference paper
First Online:
Part of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science book series (LNCS, volume 9173)

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-to-human 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.

Keywords

Knowledge management Ontology Clinical information system Patient safety 
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Notes

Acknowledgement

We thank Drs. Khalid Almoosa, Xinshuo Wu, and Jing Wang for their expertise and participation in data translation and code review. This project is in part supported by a grant on patient safety from the University of Texas System and a grant from AHRQ, grant number 1R01HS022895.

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Copyright information

© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.The University of Texas Health Science Center at HoustonHoustonUSA

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