A temporal database mediator for protocol-based decision support

To meet the data-processing requirements for protocol-based decision support, a clinical data-management system must be capable of creating high-level summaries of time-oriented patient data, and of retrieving those summaries in a temporally meaningful fashion. We previously described a temporal-abstraction module (RESUME) and a temporal-querying module (Chronus) that can be used together to perform these tasks. These modules had to be coordinated by individual applications, however, to resolve the temporal queries of protocol planners. In this paper, we present a new module that integrates the previous two modules and that provides for their coordination automatically. The new module can be used as a standalone system for retrieving both primitive and abstracted time-oriented data, or can be embedded in a larger computational framework for protocol-based reasoning.