Temporal clinical data modeling and implementation for PTCA patients in an OODBMS environment

Often clinical information carries along temporal aspects; the management of temporal clinical data must allow queries about temporal relations between clinical events. Object-oriented techniques applied to database management systems allow the definition of suitable data structures: some facilities allow the use of predefined structures when defining new ones. This approach seems to be useful in designing and implementing systems to manage complex clinical data, such as the temporal data. The authors defined and implemented a temporal clinical data model, to manage temporal data specified at different levels of granularity. This paper describes a temporally oriented medical record, based on the temporal clinical data model, managing data from patients subjected to percutaneous transluminal coronary artery angioplasty (PTCA). The authors developed it on a Sun workstation with Unix operating system and ONTOS as object-oriented DBMS. The user-interface runs on Open Windows.<>