Clinical decision support system for point of care use: Ontology-driven design and software implementation

Objectives: The objective of this research was to design a clinical decision support system (CDSS) that supports heterogeneous clinical decision problems and runs on multiple computing platforms. Meeting this objective required a novel design to create an extendable and easy to maintain clinical CDSS for point of care support. The proposed solution was evaluated in a proof of concept implementation. Methods: Based on our earlier research with the design of a mobile CDSS for emergency triage we used ontology-driven design to represent essential components of a CDSS.Models of clinical decision problems were derived from the ontology and they were processed into executable applications during runtime. This allowed scaling applications' functionality to the computing platforms. A prototype of the system was im-plemented using the extended client-server architecture and Web services to distribute the functions of the system and to make it operational in limited connectivity conditions.