Building an Ontology of Hypertension Management

摘要

The analysis of customized decisions during hypertension management in a specialized unit requires a detailed representation of clinical cases. We are building a specific ontology to code medical records and process them with computerized tools. Relevant concepts to describe and justify medical decisions are extracted from three sources: (ⅰ) Clinical guidelines; (ⅱ) Items of the semi-structured medical record form used in the clinical unit; (ⅲ) Free-text answers from 5,000 completed record forms. Combining terminological sources is mandatory to cover the whole spectrum of possible justifications for clinical decisions, including contextual specificities and patients' particulars.