An Ontology-Based Semantic Model for Sharing and Reusability of Clinical Pathways Across Context (ShaRE-CP).

Abstract

Clinical pathways (CP) enable a standardized and an efficient management of patients with common pathologies. As operational tools, they take into account knowledge from guidelines and from the context (e.g. availability of resources) in which different interventions are to be carried out. Mastering the coherence of interactions between all these knowledge domains is a major challenge for the implementation of CP. This scientific work led to the development of an ontology called Shareable and Reusable Clinical Pathway Ontology (ShaRE-CP) which integrates four knowledge domains (CP, guidelines, health resources and context) and to the establishment of existing semantic links between them. The consistency of this semantic model has been validated by using reasoners. This ontology can serve as a basis for the development of a decision support system for planning and managing patient care.