An ontology-based real-time monitoring approach to clinical pathway

The efficient and correct execution of clinical pathways (CPs) are essential for the success of healthcare. Therefore, it is important to model CPs as well as monitor their executions. At present, the management for CPs mostly look at aggregated data seen from an external observation, e.g. length of stay, cost, infection rate, etc., which may only provide a posterior impression of the overall conformance with the established CPs. To provide clinicians real-time insights into the execution of the CPs, this paper proposes an ontology-based real-time monitoring approach to CP. In details, a clinical data ontology is formally defined in Web Ontology Language (OWL) to represent medical knowledge and store the runtime medical data. Semantic Web Rule Language (SWRL) rules based on the clinical data ontology and designed for CP specifications are integrated with the monitoring workflow so that a series of applicable monitoring and evaluation can be reminded and recommended during the CP execution. The proposed approach can, therefore, provides a comprehensive monitoring service as a paralleling activity to the patient treatment journey of a CP rather than an afterthought.