Title: Retrieval and management of medical information from heterogeneous sources, for its integration in a medical record visualisation tool

Authors: Alba Cabarcos, Tamara Sanchez, Jose A. Seoane, Vanessa Aguiar-Pulido, Ana Freire, Julian Dorado, Alejandro Pazos

Addresses: Department of Information and Communication Technologies, Facultad de Informatica, University of A Coruna, Campus de Elvina, 15071 A Coruna, Spain. ' Department of Information and Communication Technologies, Facultad de Informatica, University of A Coruna, Campus de Elvina, 15071 A Coruna, Spain. ' Department of Information and Communication Technologies, Facultad de Informatica, University of A Coruna, Campus de Elvina, 15071 A Coruna, Spain. ' Department of Information and Communication Technologies, Facultad de Informatica, University of A Coruna, Campus de Elvina, 15071 A Coruna, Spain. ' Department of Information and Communication Technologies, Facultad de Informatica, University of A Coruna, Campus de Elvina, 15071 A Coruna, Spain. ' Department of Information and Communication Technologies, Facultad de Informatica, University of A Coruna, Campus de Elvina, 15071 A Coruna, Spain. ' Department of Information and Communication Technologies, Facultad de Informatica, University of A Coruna, Campus de Elvina, 15071 A Coruna, Spain

Abstract: Nowadays, medical practice needs, at the patient Point-of-Care (POC), personalised knowledge adjustable in each moment to the clinical needs of each patient, in order to provide support to decision-making processes, taking into account personalised information. To achieve this, adapting the hospital information systems is necessary. Thus, there is a need of computational developments capable of retrieving and integrating the large amount of biomedical information available today, managing the complexity and diversity of these systems. Hence, this paper describes a prototype which retrieves biomedical information from different sources, manages it to improve the results obtained and to reduce response time and, finally, integrates it so that it is useful for the clinician, providing all the information available about the patient at the POC. Moreover, it also uses tools which allow medical staff to communicate and share knowledge.

Keywords: patient point-of-care; POC; medical records; data integration; Web 2.0; collaborative tools; ontologies; UMLS; unified medical language system; visualisation; medical information; information management; information retrieval; personalised information; personalisation; biomedical information; electronic healthcare; e-healthcare; healthcare technology.

DOI: 10.1504/IJEH.2010.036208

International Journal of Electronic Healthcare, 2010 Vol.5 No.4, pp.371 - 385

Published online: 29 Oct 2010 *

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