Ontology based EMR for decision making in health care using SNOMED CT

Abstract

Health care domain is gaining more focus in the field of Ontology and Semantic research. Ontology in medicine helps in proper representation and organization of clinical terminologies. An Electronic Medical Record (EMR) based on Ontology plays a significant role in decision making process. However there is a lack of standards in constructing Ontology, based on the current needs of the healthcare professionals, which results in poor quality of information extraction. This paper proposes the use of Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine Clinical Terms (SNOMED CT), an existing medical Ontology which can be restructured to a high quality Ontology for achieving efficient information extraction. An EMR captures accurate patient information based on enriched Ontology thereby making it suitable for decision making with the help of Bayesian Belief approach.