Incorporating family and social structures into clinical documentation and retrieval

Referencing familial and social relationships between patients supplies valuable information for the retrieval and interpretation of clinical data. We present a technique for the incorporation of patient relations into data retrieval that takes into account the specific properties of routinely collected clinical data. In most clinical databases, family relations are documented in a fragmentary manner at best. Furthermore, clinical retrieval systems do not support inter-patient queries in most cases. Our model is designed to formulate direct relations between patients and to identify patients as members of either temporary or persistent communities. In this way, the model supplies information on both genetic and social relations.