An Ontology Model for Clinical Pathway Audit

Abstract

Clinical pathway is implemented to systematically record every intervention given and the development of patient. Hence, it is expected to improve the quality of services and lower the expense cost of the hospital. Ontology has been used to build a clinical pathway in order to gain semantic richness and reasoning ability. In this paper, we propose a generic clinical pathway ontology, which is specifically designed to support clinical pathway audit. It is done to measures a clinical outcome or a process against well-defined standards set on the principles of evidence-based medicine, which aims to improve the care provided. The model consists of five aspects: person, clinical pathway, record, organizational structure, and clinical category. The evaluation of the model is done using SPARQL and SQWRL to demonstrate the consistency of clinical pathway's knowledge and to demonstrate the readiness of the model to reason audit related knowledge. The evaluation shows that the model can provide information and knowledge to support audit program, including clinical pathway events/tasks, conformity of clinical pathway, clinical pathway-related services management, and patient record details.