Modeling of Clinical Pathways based on Ontology

Implementing electronic clinical pathways (ECPs) is important and necessary in the digitalized hospital. ECPs could not only improve the efficiency and quality of patient care, but also help medical staffs to share vast medical information, which is difficult with paper-based pathways. So computerization of paper-based pathways is the key point in executing the ECPs, however, there are no general methods to represent clinical pathways. The objective of this study is to adopt the ontological approach to capture and represent the clinical pathways. We analysis the structures and characteristics of 10 clinical pathways and try to build a clinical pathway ontology, which is constituted by four main units: (i) timeline; (ii) category of care; (iii) outcome criteria; (iv) variance record. This clinical pathway ontology will make a great contribution to design the ontology-based ECPs prototype integrated into electronic medical record.