An Ontology for Medical Treatment Consent

Active duty military personnel, their families and veterans seek medical services from the Military Health Service, which partners with private care, or the Veterans Administration, respectively. Indeed, medical services for active duty personnel, who need medical services on deployment, is a readiness issue. Laws that govern the practice of medicine, licensing to practice medicine and the permission to treat a patient is based on local laws (state level) that are specific to medical sub-specialties. That provides a daunting challenge to patients who move frequently, such as active duty military and their families. As most medical providers are transforming their record keeping to Electronic Medical Record (EMR) system, it is desirable to obtain, verify and act according to the legally enforced medical consent using EMRs. We present an Ontology-based framework and a prototype system that provide end-to-end services using an open source EMR system. Providing an electronically verifiable, but compliant with locally mandated laws in one universal system can be beneficial to VA and other DoD EMR systems. Keywords—informed medical consent; medical consent law; workflow management system; ontology