Controlled vocabulary and design of laboratory results displays

Traditional data-review displays are driven by the ancillary systems that produced the data. A different paradigm is being used at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center (CPMC) where a controlled medical vocabulary-the Medical Entities Dictionary (MED) is the driving force behind laboratory data-review displays. Using hierarchical and semantic networks the authors have constructed a Web-based tool that considerably simplifies the MED-editing task required to create new displays. The tool uses knowledge in the MED to extract contextually relevant hierarchic and semantic sub-nets from the MED. The tool has a sensitivity of 92.2% and a relevance of 94.7% for retrieval of terms from the MED. Based on these results and given sufficient domains' structure within controlled vocabularies, we conclude that similar algorithms will enable applications to design and generate customized displays on-the-fly.