Lorrie K. Roemer

KAT: A Flexible XML-based Knowledge Authoring Environment

As part of an enterprise effort to develop new clinical information systems at Intermountain Health Care, the authors have built a knowledge authoring tool that facilitates the development and refinement of medical knowledge content. At present, users of the application can compose order sets and an assortment of other structured clinical knowledge documents based on XML schemas. The flexible nature of the application allows the immediate authoring of new types of documents once an appropriate XML schema and accompanying Web form have been developed and stored in a shared repository. The need for a knowledge acquisition tool stems largely from the desire for medical practitioners to be able to write their own content for use within clinical applications. We hypothesize that medical knowledge content for clinical use can be successfully created and maintained through XML-based document frameworks containing structured and coded knowledge.

Redundancy in a computer-generated order list: meeting the needs of nurses at various levels of practice expertise.

Paper-based clinical practice standards usually pertain to a single diagnosis or clinical condition. When a computerized provider order entry system applies multiple paper-based practice standards to one patient, it generates an order list containing redundant orders. Nurses respond to redundant orders on the basis of their level of nursing expertise with clinical care, computers, and practice standard domains. In this project, orders from three practice standards were manually combined to create a single order list, resulting in 15 duplicate and overlapping orders. A relational database was developed to test the automated removal of redundant orders. As expected, the automatically evaluated order list contained only one of each duplicate order and only the parent of each overlapping order group. Orders were then grouped by related system or function for readability. It is possible to automate the removal of duplicate and overlapping orders from an order list before display to the nurse.

The Knowledge Authoring Tool: An XML-based Knowledge Acquisition Environment

As part of an enterprise effort to develop new clinical information systems at Intermountain Health Care, we are developing a Knowledge Authoring Tool that facilitates the development of medical knowledge. At present, users of the application can compose order sets and other clinical knowledge documents based upon XML schemas. The flexible nature of the application allows for the authoring of new types of documents once an XML schema and accompanying web form have been developed and stored in a shared repository. The need for a knowledge acquisition tool stems largely from the desire for medical practitioners to be able to write their own content for clinical use. We hypothesize that knowledge content for clinical use can be successfully implemented around XML-based document frameworks containing structured and coded knowledge.