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The Problem of Retrieving Clinical Guidelines in Self-Care

Authors:
Juha Puustjärvi
Leena Puustjärvi

Keywords: Self-Care; Clinical Guidelines; Evidence-Based Medicine; Semantic Web; SPARQL

Abstract:
Self-care is what people do for themselves to establish and maintain health, prevent and deal with illness. A clinical guideline is a document with the aim of guiding decisions and criteria regarding diagnosis, management, and treatment in specific areas of healthcare. Clinical guidelines have been in use for thousands of years during the entire history of medicine. An interesting question arising from these notions is whether clinical guidelines can be used in self-care to ensure that the treatment is in line with the medical recommends. A problem, however, is that the retrieval methods of clinical guidelines are mainly aimed at healthcare personnel who are taught to retrieve relevant guidelines. In order to simplify patients’ tasks in retrieving guidelines, we have designed an ontology (vocabulary) for annotating clinical guidelines. A patient can then query clinical guidelines by keyword expressions, which are intuitive and clear for patients. Technically annotations are presented according to the Semantic web technologies, and so they are machine understandable. Further, guidelines can be retrieved from a variety of sources within one query. In addition, the system can be easily extended such that guidelines and other relevant health-oriented information can be retrieved in a query.

Pages: 1 to 4

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2017

Publication date: March 19, 2017

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2308-4359

ISBN: 978-1-61208-540-1

Location: Nice, France

Dates: from March 19, 2017 to March 23, 2017