Enhancing patient safety through clinical communication knowledge representation

Clinical communication is considered the leading cause to medical errors [1]. In order to improve communication, a comprehensive understanding of the overall communication process in health care is required. In an attempt to further understand clinical communication, we conducted a thorough methodology literature review to identify strengths and limitations of previously utilized approaches. This research work proposes a new data collection plan that will study the clinical communication activities among the ICU clinical team. Along with refining the clinical communication model we previously proposed [2], this is a step towards building an exhaustive representation of the clinical communication framework to be implemented in medical error reporting systems through an ontological approach. The aim behind further understanding clinical communication is to develop an educational tool that can educate clinicians about communication habits, trends, and risks. The ultimate goal of our research is to improve clinical communication knowledge, reduce medical errors and hence, enhance patient safety.