An ontological modeling approach to align institution-specific Clinical Pathways: Towards inter-institution care standardization

In this paper we pursue the standardization of care, for a specific medical condition, across multiple institutions through the alignment of institutionspecific clinical pathways. Our approach is to represent institution-specific Clinical Pathways (CP) using an ontological model and then align the common care activities between multiple CP, based on their semantic descriptions, to generate a `maximally standardized´ care model that merges common care activities whilst allowing to administer unique institution-specific care activities. Our semantic web based approach is used to develop a standardized prostate cancer care model for three Canadian institutions, such that the standardized model can be executed via a web-based system to streamline patient care.