The two halves of my working life have placed me in a unique position to explore the emerging clinical informatics discipline. I explore, and bridge, uncharted ground between the two worlds of IT and health.
Here, I showcase some semantic technologies I developed.
The site was constructed 'from-scratch' with an initial idea, that is, to make semantic technologies do useful things.
To this end, the site contains five demonstrations which include an amalgam of technologies such as: Tomcat, JAVA, APACHE, Lucene, RDF, logic reasoning and OWL-DL ontologies all working together to:
1) Do simple searches in an ICD-10AM ontology
2) Use an artificial intelligence reasoner to infer new patient knowledge in a synthetic hospital ward
3) Suggest new words from the nursing terminology ontology in nursing patient notes.
4) Use JSON to calculate the fire danger index for a town.
5) Use FHIR to add and display patient details.
Ontologies may provide the following benefits in health:
Persistent organisational memory:
Ontologies are consumable knowledge which can be stored, this means, processes are not lost if a key member leaves the organisation.
Process modulation:
Ontologies may be used to add, or delete redundant processes, thus improving patient outcomes and productivity.
Instructional tool:
Ontologies may be useful as evidence to show non-clinicians where resources/money could be better placed.
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