SEMPATH: Adapting Clinical Pathways by Utilizing Semantic Technologies

The increase of treatment quality offered by the healthcare organizations is one of the main challenges of the modern health informatics. The personalization of treatment presupposes the real-time adaptation of treatment schemes since the clinical status of the patient and circumstances inside a healthcare organization constantly change. In this paper we present SEMPATH prototype which aims at providing a solution concerning the real-time adaptation of healthcare business processes. The prototype consists of a healthcare process execution engine assisted by a semantic framework for the adaptation. The semantic framework consists of an ontology enclosing the required knowledge based on which a semantic rule set was created. During the execution time of the clinical pathways, the system reasons over the rules, the knowledge and information collected, and provides decisions and recommendations for the next steps of the treatment. Moreover, the results of the rule-set execution may produce new knowledge objects which are inserted in the ontology. The continuous recycling of knowledge combined with the rule-set leads to the personalization of treatment of the patients.