Arden syntax studio: Creating medical logic module as shareable knowledge

Abstract

Clinical Decision Support Systems assist the physicians to make critical decisions during the diagnosis and treatment of the patients. CDSS envisions an extendable, shareable and reusable knowledge base to generate shareable guidelines and recommendations. Existing systems utilize HL7 standard Arden Syntax MLM and data model vMR schema for shareability and interoperability purpose. Understanding the Arden Syntax and vMR schema classes is tedious task for physicians, therefore an easy to use knowledge authoring environment is required to overcome the barrier of acquiring clinical knowledge. We are presenting Arden Syntax based authoring environment called Arden Syntax Studio that provides an easy to use interface to the physicians for creating shareable MLM without understanding the HL7 standard Arden Syntax. The created MLM can easily integrate with other healthcare systems by using HL7 standard data model vMR. The system hides the vMR layer from physicians by replacing vMR schema class's layer with corresponding understandable healthcare system's concepts. Therefore, the physician does not need to learn and understand complete Arden Syntax and vMR data model to create shareable rules in form of MLM. The system also provides the Intelli-sense functionality to enhance the knowledge rule creation process and reduce the possibilities of physician's errors. Furthermore, to enhance the interoperability feature our system capitalizes standard terminologies of the SNOMED CT concepts. The terminologies that are specific to organization, environment or region are handled with localized concepts in addition to SNOMED CT concepts.