Information Infrastructure For Healthcare (October 1994)

An Expert Knowledge Server With a General Vocabulary Server Interface

Sponsor: Atmedica (formerly Health Ink and Vitality Communications/Utah Health)

• Project Performance Period: 4/1/1995 - 9/30/1998
• Total project (est.): $2,628,000.00
• Requested ATP funds: $1,972,000.00

The need for improved healthcare information systems to integrate patient records from disparate sources is generally accepted. But equally important is the need for an intelligent and "medically knowledgeable" interface between the physician and the medical records system, according to researchers at Applied Medical Informatics (AMI). AMI already has a successful medical information product, a "knowledge-base" system called Iliad, used by doctors and medical schools for diagnostic advice and decision support. Iliad "understands" thousands of medical facts from histories, physical exams, lab tests, and the like but relies on information entered by the user. It cannot get patient information from other databases, nor can other databases use its resources. AMI proposes to use Iliad as a base from which to model a much more powerful medical information system with three parts: an expert knowledge server that incorporates both general medical knowledge with specific patient information recovered from existing databases, a general model for a "vocabulary server," and the framework for an intelligent user interface. The Inter-System Vocabulary Server will be a general tool that maps the inherent "vocabulary" of a particular medical information system to a metastructure, and then provides automatic "translations" between any two information systems that have been expressed in the metastructure. The Intelligent User Interface will use expert-system technology to provide a flexible, physician-oriented interface to the knowledge server.

For project information:

Omar Bouhaddou, (801) 464-6209
Omarb@cc.Utah.edu

ATP Project Manager

Barbara Cuthill, (301) 975-3273
barbara.cuthill@nist.gov