How To Build A Modern Patient Care Application

Patient care is typically supported by several incompatible applications in terms of their data models and semantics, ranging from support for surgery, to ICUs, to standard health care. These programs are focused on specific situation and give doctors a very limited view at patient information. This paper argues that the IT technology has evolved to a point that it is now possible to develop a generic patient care application that manages all patient data for all situations. Furthermore, this application provides a framework for capturing medical knowledge. With this knowledge the application is able to extract medically relevant information from data, even if the extraction is outside of the medical expertise of a doctor or if the extraction is outside of the capability of the human brain. Medical knowledge can be customized by domain, personal views, and patient condition. Additional benefits are: alerting the right doctor of time critical situations, identifying relevant information from a (new) patient's history, and timely sharing of (new and codified) medical knowledge and experience across the medical community. The ideas are based on prototype work between the University of Utah, Health Science Center (UUHSC), the University of Coimbra, and Oracle (Guerra et al., 2009).