An ontology based framework for navigation support in Electronic Discharge Summaries

A Discharge Summary gives significant data to patients to dealing with their post-discharge care. It is found that Discharge summaries impose cognizance hindrances for consumers with respect in discovering related information in the long document and the troublesome vocabulary. In case patients are proposed to be the primary audience of the discharge summaries, then efforts should be made to enhance the data access for ordinary health consumers. This paper proposes an ontology based framework to provide navigation support in Electronic Discharge Summaries (EDSs). The final result contains hierarchal structure of semantic groups commonly used by Consumers to visualize their clinical information, displayed on Ontology Annotation Tool (OAT) presented in General Architecture for Text Engineering (GATE). EDS Navigation Ontology is grouped into four Consumer oriented semantic groups. The high-level hierarchy of the ontology includes the group of Anatomy, Chemical & Drugs, Genes & Molecular Disorder and Procedures, each group could be expanded into subgroups by the Consumers or Intended Audience if desired. The Natural Language Processing (NLP) based Semantic Annotations is performed to populate the EDS Navigation Ontology and to provide ontology based navigation in free clinical text of Electronic Discharge Summaries. The Evaluation is performed by creating the Semantic Annotations on three use cases of sample Electronic Discharge Summaries. On the average 648 UMLS Concepts are mapped into EDSs, from all annotated UMLS Concepts 32.03% concepts mapped to our EDS Navigation Ontology to provide navigation support in which 4.16% concepts related to Anatomy, 6.27% related to Chemical & Drugs, 12.96% related to Genes & Molecular Disorder and 8.64% related to Procedures. Overall, our strategy provides a navigation support to related concepts in EDSs in free clinical text.