Title :
A Holistic Environment for the Design and Execution of Self-Adaptive Clinical Pathways
Author :
Alexandrou, D.A. ; Skitsas, Ioannis E. ; Mentzas, Gregoris N.
Author_Institution :
UBITECH Res., Athens, Greece
Abstract :
One of the main challenges to be confronted by modern health care, so as to increase treatment quality, is the personalization of treatment. The treatment personalization requires the continuous reconfiguration and adaptation of the selected treatment schemes according to the “current” clinical status of each patient and “current” circumstances inside a health care organization that change rapidly, as well as the updated medical knowledge. In this paper, we present an innovative software environment that provides an integrated IT solution concerning the adaptation of health care processes (clinical pathways) during execution time. The software comprises a health care process execution engine assisted by a semantic infrastructure for reconfiguring the clinical pathways. During the execution of clinical pathways, the system reasons over the rules and reconfigures the next steps of the treatment. A graphical designer interface is implemented for the definition of the rule-set for the clinical pathways adaptation in a user-friendly way.
Keywords :
computer graphics; health care; medical computing; patient care; graphical designer interface; health care organization; innovative software environment; modern health care; self-adaptive clinical pathways; semantic infrastructure; treatment personalization; treatment quality; updated medical knowledge; Guidelines; Medical diagnostic imaging; Medical services; Ontologies; Personnel; Semantics; Software; Adaptive clinical pathways; clinical pathway ontology (CPO); personalized treatment; Critical Pathways; Medical Informatics Applications; Software; User-Computer Interface;
Journal_Title :
Information Technology in Biomedicine, IEEE Transactions on
DOI :
10.1109/TITB.2010.2074205