Maintenance of Domain Knowledge for Nursing Care using Data in Hospital Information System

Schedule management of hospitalization is important to maintain or improve the quality of medical care and application of a clinical pathway is one of the important solutions for the management. Although several kinds of deductive methods for construction for a clinical pathway have been proposed, the customization is one of the important problems. This research proposed an inductive approach to support the customization of existing clinical pathways by using data on nursing actions stored in a hospital information system. Since hospital data include temporal trends of clinical symptoms and medical services, we can discover not only knowledge about temporal evolution of disease, but also one about medical practice from hospital information system. This paper proposes temporal data mining process and applied the method to capture temporal knowledge about nursing practice. The results show that the reuse of stored data will give a powerful tool for management of nursing schedule and lead to improvement of hospital services.