Alahmar Ayman, AlMousa Mohannad, Benlamri Rachid
Department of Software Engineering, Lakehead University, Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada.
Digit Health. 2022 Mar 31;8:20552076221089796. doi: 10.1177/20552076221089796. eCollection 2022 Jan-Dec.
The increasing number of patients and heavy workload drive health care institutions to search for efficient and cost-effective methods to deliver optimal care. Clinical pathways are promising care plans that proved to be efficient in reducing costs and optimizing resource usage. However, most clinical pathways are circulated in paper-based formats. Clinical pathway computerization is an emerging research field that aims to integrate clinical pathways with health information systems. A key process in clinical pathway computerization is the standardization of clinical pathway terminology to comply with digital terminology systems. Since clinical pathways include sensitive medical terms, clinical pathway standardization is performed manually and is difficult to automate using machines. The objective of this research is to introduce automation to clinical pathway standardization. The proposed approach utilizes a semantic score-based algorithm that automates the search for SNOMED CT terms. The algorithm was implemented in a software system with a graphical user interface component that physicians can use to standardize clinical pathways by searching for and comparing relevant SNOMED CT retrieved automatically by the algorithm. The system has been tested and validated on SNOMED CT ontology. The experimental results show that the system reached a maximum search space reduction of 98.9% within any single iteration of the algorithm and an overall average of 71.3%. The system enables physicians to locate the proper terms precisely, quickly, and more efficiently. This is demonstrated using case studies, and the results show that human-guided automation is a promising methodology in the field of clinical pathway standardization and computerization.
患者数量的不断增加和繁重的工作量促使医疗机构寻找高效且具成本效益的方法来提供优质护理。临床路径是很有前景的护理计划，已被证明在降低成本和优化资源利用方面是有效的。然而，大多数临床路径以纸质形式传播。临床路径计算机化是一个新兴的研究领域，旨在将临床路径与健康信息系统整合。临床路径计算机化的一个关键过程是临床路径术语的标准化，以符合数字术语系统。由于临床路径包含敏感的医学术语，临床路径标准化是手动进行的，难以通过机器自动化。本研究的目的是将自动化引入临床路径标准化。所提出的方法利用基于语义分数的算法来自动搜索SNOMED CT术语。该算法在一个带有图形用户界面组件的软件系统中实现，医生可以使用该组件通过搜索和比较算法自动检索的相关SNOMED CT来标准化临床路径。该系统已在SNOMED CT本体上进行了测试和验证。实验结果表明，该系统在算法的任何一次迭代中实现了最大98.9%的搜索空间缩减，总体平均为71.3%。该系统使医生能够精确、快速且更高效地找到合适的术语。通过案例研究证明了这一点，结果表明人工引导的自动化在临床路径标准化和计算机化领域是一种很有前景的方法。
