Toward active patient record: an application to Holter monitoring based on UMLS

The study of new patient record (PR) models, advanced enough to help caregivers producing and updating clinical texts, can significantly contribute to improve health care. Such innovative concepts, leading toward the realisation of the active PR, can be extended up to reduce in many instances the physician-patient gap. In this framework the authors´ study tackles a basic question of the above process, that is the standardisation of medical language as used in generating a PR. The extent of the problem suggested the authors to start studying a specific section of the PR, the Holter monitoring data, possibly to be used as a paradigm of the whole PR. A controlled medical vocabulary (UMLS) drives the construction of an entity-relationship (ER) diagram, needed to determine the set of Holter monitoring data and the relationships among them. Performance evaluation shows that this approach reliably mimics meaningful clinical statements.