Knowledge Representation in Patient Safety Reporting: An Ontological Approach

Abstract

Purpose: The current development of patient safety reporting systems is criticized for loss of information and low data quality due to the lack of a uniformed domain knowledge base and text processing functionality. To improve patient safety reporting, the present paper suggests an ontological representation of patient safety knowledge.Design/methodology/approach: We propose a framework for constructing an ontological knowledge base of patient safety. The present paper describes our design, implementation, and evaluation of the ontology at its initial stage. Findings:We describe the design and initial outcomes of the ontology implementation. The evaluation results demonstrate the clinical validity of the ontology by a self-developed survey measurement. Research limitations:The proposed ontology was developed and evaluated using a small number of information sources. Presently, US data are used, but they are not essential for the ultimate structure of the ontology. Practical implications:The goal of improving patient safety can be aided through investigating patient safety reports and providing actionable knowledge to clinical practitioners. As such, constructing a domain specific ontology for patient safety reports serves as a cornerstone in information collection and text mining methods.Originality/value: The use of ontologies provides abstracted representation of semantic information and enables a wealth of applications in a reporting system. Therefore, constructing such a knowledge base is recognized as a high priority in health care.

Challenges to the Implementation of the World Health Organization's International Classification for Patient Safety in Slovenia

“…Liang and Gong 33 Constructing ontology in Protégé to merge structures, concepts, and terms from the Common Formats and ICPS with adequate properties.…”

Challenges and Opportunities of Patient Safety Event Reporting

“…Therefore, a compatible taxonomy could help solve the problems that currently pose barriers to data integration, system interoperability, and transition from data repositories to intelligent systems [36]. To overcome the barriers and improve the quality of reports, researchers have developed an ontology for e-reporting based on the WHO ICPS and AHRQ Common Formats, which helps user-centered design by providing data entry support as well as feedback upon reporting to ensure data quality [37].…”

“…The other ontological approach is reported to model patient safety incidents knowledge from the ICPS [45][46][47]. Recent progress has been reported to develop a patient safety ontology to underpin incident reporting regulated by the AHRQ Common Formats [37,48] and incident analysis using NLP [49,50].…”

“…Second, the 'ontology language' is computer understandable [53]. This feature largely improves the automation of patient safety knowledge management, particularly tasks involving narrative medical incident data [37].…”

Analysis of applying a patient safety taxonomy to patient and clinician-reported incident reports during the COVID-19 pandemic: a mixed methods study

“…Classification systems are important tools for providing structure to meaningful reporting and data analysis [ 8 ] and help to make sense of the complex nature of patient safety incidents [ 9 ]. A taxonomy is required to standardise these classifications into a hierarchical form to aid categorisation and organisation [ 10 ].…”