Improving information prescription to parents of premature infants through an OWL-based knowledge mediator

In the Baby CareLink system, information prescription plays an important role in preparing parents of premature infants for the eventual discharge to home of their children. However, the prescription process requires scarce clinician time in order to dispense information, and can become cumbersome as content bases grow in size. We describe the development of an OWL-based knowledge mediator to facilitate information prescription. We describe 1) the initial development of a clinical vocabulary for neonatology using OWL-DL; 2) the reuse of the vocabulary to represent prototypical premature infants and their typical clinical problems and treatments; 3) the software components used to integrate terminology and inferencing services with Baby CareLink. We demonstrate multifaceted uses for description logics in a clinical application, reuse of a base vocabulary for domain knowledge representation, and use of the OWL language in representing clinical vocabularies. We believe that semi-automated knowledge mediation will enhance the process of electronic information prescription using large clinical content collections.