Patient Record as a Semantic Graph

version 12 Feb 2014 / Etienne Saliez /

• Problems:
  • Today medical record contain very many items, but it is difficult to see the relations between a large amount of facts, hypothesis and actions.
  • In the past soon or later a patient has been seen by several health professionals, doctors, nurses, paramedical. Every professional has his own way to take notes on his own, paying mainly attention to his own specialty. Even if all these note would be available, there is a great need for a synthesis.
  • The traditional medical education was based on "lectures" and did not include much training how to solve problems. Many static documents are already available on internet, but that is not enough to learn to become operational.
• Objectives:
  • A graphical overview on the various items contained in a patient record, showing the relations between these items.
  • Support training sessions intended for medical students, young doctors and nurses, in a telemedicine setup across internet.
• Approaches:
  • The context is the Open Source working group of the ISfTeH, International Society for Telemedicine and eHealth, http://www.isfteh.org/working_groups/category/collaborative_care_team_in_open_source .
  • This project is similar to the project " Patient Dashboard " but focus on a graphical presentation as a kind of semantic graph.
  • The goal is to show the relations between the items contained in a patient record.
  • Everything should be seen as an object, as well the medical items as well the links between these items. The links have attributes like author, time, linked items, degree of belief, etc...
  • The graph should be interactive, allowing modifications and creations of new objects. For example something looking like http://bost.ocks.org/mike/fisheye/ ? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:WorldWideWebAroundWikipedia.png , http://qt-project.org/wiki/PySide ? etc ...
  • Like the "Patient Dashboard" project, the graph is here only a summary. A click on a node will provide a zoom to more detailed medical record documents.
  • Moreover the same semantic approach should provide access to medical knowledge from external databases.
  • Like the "Patient Dashboard" project, the central region of the graph should focus on the patient current "Problem List" and provide links to the observations having motivated the identification of the problem. A the other side links to the decided actions in function of the problems, http://www.chos-wg.eu/Models/iterative-care-model.html.
  • Today Internet provide a good way to make training available to many students and beginners of developing regions, who otherwise could not afford to stay at an university, http://www.chos-wg.eu/PBTL/PBTL.html .
• Requirements:
  • In principle use exclusively Open Source software tools.
  • Python as the main programming language.
  • Since medical object to be archived may be complex and very polymorphic, object data bases are preferred.
  • Results to be published as Open Source in a repository like Gitlab.
  • In order to develop exchanges with partners of other countries in the ISfTeH community, all documentations need to be in English.
• Deliverables:
  • Make a prototype of interactive semantic graph, representing the main items of one patient record.