Development of an Ontology-based Flexible Clinical Pathway System

The efficient storage of medical knowledge is critical for the advancement of medicine; a flexible platform for the storage of knowledge is the need of the hour. Therefore, this work focuses on clinical pathways—tools that effectively maintain the quality and control the cost of medicine—to formulate a model for knowledge storage. In this work, ontology was employed as the fundamental theory to facilitate the construction of a flexible system. Using task and domain ontologies, clinical pathway knowledge becomes more accessible, as domain and operation knowledge are available separately. Moreover, taking into account the continued refinement of clinical pathways, this work developed cost-effective and quality health care systems, using quartile and variance computations to identify problematic treatments and pathways and to refine decision support systems. The integration of an ontological approach with quartile and variance algorithms for clinical pathways was implemented by system development, the outcome of which is presented in this paper.