Ontology modeling for generation of clinical pathways
Abstract: Increasing costs of
health care, fuelled by demand for high quality, cost-effective healthcare has
drove hospitals to streamline their patient care delivery systems. One such
systematic approach is the adaptation of Clinical Pathways (CP) as a tool to
increase the quality of healthcare delivery. However, most organizations still
rely on are paper-based pathway guidelines or specifications, which have
limitations in process management and as a result can influence patient safety
outcomes. In this paper, we present a method for generating clinical pathways
based on organizational semiotics by capturing knowledge from syntactic,
semantic and pragmatic to social level.
Design/methodology/approach: The proposed modeling approach to generation
of CPs adopts organizational semiotics and enables the generation of
semantically rich representation of CP knowledge. Semantic Analysis Method
(SAM) is applied to explicitly represent the semantics of the concepts, their
relationships and patterns of behavior in terms of an ontology chart. Norm
Analysis Method (NAM) is adopted to identify and formally specify patterns of
behavior and rules that govern the actions identified on the ontology chart.
Information collected during semantic and norm analysis is integrated to guide
the generation of CPs using best practice represented in BPMN thus enabling the
automation of CP.
Findings: This research confirms the necessity of taking into
consideration social aspects in designing information systems and automating
CP. The complexity of healthcare processes can be best tackled by analyzing
stakeholders, which we treat as social agents, their goals and patterns of
action within the agent network.
Originality/value: The current modeling methods describe CPs from a
structural aspect comprising activities, properties and interrelationships.
However, these methods lack a mechanism to describe possible patterns of human
behavior and the conditions under which the behavior will occur. To overcome
this weakness, a semiotic approach to generation of clinical pathway is
introduced. The CP generated from SAM together with norms will enrich the
knowledge representation of the domain through ontology modeling, which allows
the recognition of human responsibilities and obligations and more importantly,
the ultimate power of decision making in exceptional circumstances.
Keywords: Clinical pathways,
process modeling, BPMN, organizational semiotics, ontology chart, semantic
analysis method, medical quality improvement
Author: Jasmine Tehrani,
Kecheng Liu, Vaughan Michell
Journal Code: jptindustrigg120029
