Designing an Ontology-based Health Information System: A systematic Approach

Ontology as a creative tool plays an essential role in acquisition and organization of knowledge and its representation in a special field. The important point is that ontology is usually applied in designing information systems and is useful for providing healthcare in design of health information systems by providing a comprehensive model of information and process needs. This comprehensive review study is based on existing resources and articles. Considering that a special methodology is used for creation and development of ontology in each domain, therefore, a methodology was presented for designing ontology of health information systems in the conducted studies and based on the general model by Pinto and Martin. The general model was changed in healthcare in order to support design and evaluation of information systems. This systematic approach includes the following three groups; stages, activity, and output. These stages include: specification, conceptualization, formalization, implementation, evaluation and maintenance. It should be noted that two main challenges are observed in designing ontology-based health information systems: designing useful and accurate comprehensive ontologies in healthcare systems, the second challenge is how ontologies should be coordinated with designing and evaluating health systems.Accepting a framework based on ontology provides a strong opportunity for integration and analysis of supervision system data and allows for executing rules based on evaluation in domain of health information systems. [Marziye Meraji, Farahnaz Sadoughi, Maryam Ahmadi, Mohsen Kahani. Designing an Ontology-based Health Information System: A systematic Approach. Life Sci J 2013; 10(7s): 735-740] (ISSN: 1097-8135). http://www.lifesciencesite.com. 115