Semantic Web Framework for Knowledge-Centric Clinical Decision Support Systems

Lately, there have been considerable efforts to computerize Clinical Practice Guidelines (CPG) so that they can be executed via Clinical Decision Support Systems (CDSS) at the point of care. We present a Semantic Web framework to both model and execute the knowledge within a CPG to develop knowledge-centric CDSS. Our approach entails knowledge modeling through a synergy between multiple ontologies–i.e. a domain ontology, CPG ontology and patient ontology. We develop decision-rules based on the ontologies, and execute them with a proof engine to derive CPG-based patient specific recommendations. We present a prototype of our CPG-based CDSS to execute the CPG for Follow-up after Treatment for Breast Cancer.