Concepts Issues and Standards. Applications Using the Unified Medical Language System: Toward a Public Domain UMLS Patient Database

摘要

This paper describes a unified structure and with an associated vocabulary to represent and store patient cases derived from different computerized patient databases. The unified structure is based on the concept of event definitions which are generic templates for representing clinical data in a patient database. An implementation of this structure has been evaluated using patient cases from two expert systems (Iliad [1] and QMR [2]) and a hospital information system (HELP [3]). The primary focus of the UMLS patient database is to accumulate patient information from different sources and provide enhanced statistical estimates of clinically important variables. Inter-communication and navigation among medical information systems are other potential benefits of this unified computerized medical record system.