Interfacing a stand-alone diagnostic expert system with a hospital information system.

Few diagnostic decision-support systems are in routine clinical use, mainly because these systems typically require time-consuming manual data entry. This research investigated the feasibility of reducing manual data entry by integrating a stand-alone diagnostic expert system with an existing comprehensive hospital information system (HIS). A knowledge-based intervocabulary mapping technique was developed to map disparate vocabularies. The results of a retrospective study indicate that transferring clinical data from the HIS to the diagnostic expert system at the beginning of workup significantly reduces the manual data entry required for generating the correct diagnoses for patients.