Standardization of Patient Safety Reports Comparison by an International Information Model aligned with Upper Level Ontologies

摘要

To report on Patient Safety (PS) incidents several artifacts have been proposed. Since 2007, the WHO (World Health Organization) Department of Patient Safety steered work to define a conceptual framework with domain experts. But this first model had some structural defects and a lack of formal rigor to become a standard. WHO commissioned a semantic model using the Categorial Structure (CAST) top-down method, named PS-CAST, that brought a set of constraints which guaranteed a well-constructed semantic structure. In the meantime, a bottom up approach from existing reporting systems in Japan has been conducted, and the merging of these top-down and bottom-up approaches has resulted in an International Information Model for Patient Safety (21MPS). We describe in this paper the next step of this standardization work, consisting in the alignment of PS-CAST on two approved and accepted biomedical Upper-Level Ontologies (ULO): BioTop and BFO (Basic Formal Ontology). This alignment will support 21MPS in its objective to allow consistent international or inter-jurisdictional comparisons of Patient Safety reporting systems.