Current Research

A Case Study for Clinical Decision Support Systems based on openEHR
Traditional CDSS Architectures & openEHR

Subjective Dry Mouth (Xerostomia) is a kind of oral disease that can be a result of other diseases or an adverse effect of previous medications. Regarding medical references, treatment directly is related to finding cause(s) of disease. In our point of view, as Computer scientists, this equals to classification of Dry Mouth to some categories based on its causes; and in each specific case, decide to which category the patient’s illness belongs.
To have a CDSS to help clinicians during the process of decision making for this special case namely Xerostomia, we need a formal model of knowledge that is required for reasoning. This reasoning should be based on not only clinicians’ experiences and expertise, but also guidelines and other evidences to fairly support evidence based medicine as is one of the main aims of this project. Selecting a proper reasoner is another issue that should be considered.
On the other hand, by the aim of involving clinicians in the process of developing clinical applications, and in order to support life long Electronic Health Recpord(EHR), recent efforts have resulted in standards such as openEHR architecture. After some studies on openEHR, direction of our research changed toward investigating suitability of this architecture in practical environments moslty developing an openEHR based Clinical Decision Support System(CDSS).

we are now working on integration of openEHR Archetypes and Templates to CDSS.