Providing relevant health information to patient-centered healthcare

Patient-centric healthcare is an emerging healthcare model that optimizes the healthcare system to focus on patient experience and outcomes for better health and well-being. It requires that patients as well as physicians should have the ability to obtain and understand health information, and make appropriate health decisions. A problem is how such health information should be gathered from a variety of heterogeneous data sources, and how patient and physicians should access such information. Our argument is that the gathered information should not be presented as a collection of XML-documents but rather the information should be stored in an ontology based data store (knowledge base), which provides sophisticated features for accessing health information. How this kind of solution can be implemented by exploiting ontology languages RDF and OWL is the topic of this paper.