Improving Patient Care in Transport Medicine through an Ontological Approach

Electronic Health Records enhance patient care across medicine enabling providers to view historical information from the patients chart, viewing results from participating agencies, sharing notes with providers outside their institution and utilizing integrated support systems which protect against medication errors and redundancies. The field of transport medicine revolves around emergent patient transports by ambulance, helicopter and plane. These are resource poor environments and, coincidentally, occur during the most critical times of the patient’s condition. The need to support transport clinicians with the most valid pertinent information about each patient is the main focus to our research. We proposed an ontological approach around transport medicine protocols which associated multiple diseases and their associated symptoms. We have developed semantic queries using the patient’s current symptoms as input and the query result is analyzed by an algorithm that we created to derive probable diseases. The algorithm uses types of associated symptoms based on the ontology to quantify a confidence level for each possible disease. If the disease ruled in, we presented this information to the clinician as part of a decision support system. We used this output to query the patient’s existing EHR for relevant medical history regarding the current disease process. We provide both the probable diagnoses along with the patient’s relevant history in a single XML resource document.