Using OWL Ontologies for Clinical Guidelines Based Comorbid Decision Support

In this paper we present an ontology-based clinical decision-support framework for handling comorbidities by alignment of ontology modeled clinical practice guidelines (CPG). Our knowledge management approach to develop clinical decision support systems for co-morbid conditions entails: (a) knowledge synthesis to derive disease-specific clinical pathways (CP) from evidence-bases sources, (b) knowledge modeling to abstract medical and procedural knowledge from the CP, (c) knowledge representation to computerize the CP in terms of a CP ontology, and (d) knowledge alignment by aligning multiple CP to develop a unified CP knowledge model for co morbid diseases. We present the COMET (Co-morbidity Ontological Modeling & ExecuTion) system that provides decision support to handle co morbid chronic heart failure and a trial fibrillation. COMET is web-accessible and is designed for family practitioners.