Biomedical subjects

E J van der Haring

Publications and source records attributed to E J van der Haring.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2006

ClaML: a standard for the electronic publication of classification coding schemes.

This paper proposes a number of revisions to CEN/TS 14463 (ClaML), which is a pre-standard mark-up language for the electronic publication of classification coding schemes. A CEN Taskforce in close collaboration with the WHO network carefully analysed 70 classifications from the healthcare domain. All were transformed in ClaML using a dedicated classification management tool. The proposal removes all formatting elements and adds a number of layout structuring elements. Several elements have been replaced by attributes to enforce internal consistency. A modest number of extensions are proposed to help users and authors in maintenance and version control. A pilot implementation has shown that ICD10 as one of the most complex traditional classifications can be adequately represented to produce quality printed output.

Forms and Records Control↗

PubMed2002

Quality control in management of pain.

Since 1987 several pain clinics in The Netherlands have started with some kind of computer-assisted recording of data, mainly for purposes of quality control. However, this has not yet led to routinely generated reports about the quality of these clinics because a consensus on how to assess quality in pain-treatment is missing. Using classical system-development methods a global specification for an information system for quality assessment was defined on which a prototype application was based. Various changes were adopted into this prototype, which ultimately resulted in explicit requirements stating: 1. Which data to record, 2. What organisational prerequisites to fulfil for such a system, 3. The user-interface, and 4. Interactions with other information systems. The final application was implemented in a number of pain clinics where its usefulness in quality control is currently assessed.

Benchmarking↗

PubMed1998

Reconciling users' needs and formal requirements: issues in developing a reusable ontology for medicine.

A common language, or terminology, for representing what clinicians have said and done is an important requirement for individual clinical systems, and it is a pre-requisite for integrating disparate applications in a distributed telematic healthcare environment. Formal representations based on description logics or closely related formalisms are increasingly used for representing medical terminologies. GALEN's experience in using one such formalism raises two major issues, as follows: how to make ontologies based on description logics easy to use and understand for both clinicians and applications developers; what features are required of the ontology and description logic if they are to achieve their aims. Based on our experience we put forward four contentions: two relating to each of these two issues, as follows: that natural language generation is essential to make a description logic based ontology accessible to users; that the description logic based ontology should be treated as an "assembly language" and accessed via "intermediate representations" oriented to users and "perspectives" adapting it to specific applications; that independence and reuse are best supported by partitioning the subsumption hierarchy of elementary concepts into orthogonal taxonomies, each of which forms a pure tree in which the branches at each level are disjoint but nonexhaustive subconcepts of the parent concept; that the expressivity of the description logic must include support for transitive relations despite the computational cost, and that this computational cost is acceptable in practice. The authors argue that these features will be necessary, though by no means sufficient, for the development of any large reusable ontology for medicine.

Clinical Medicine↗

PubMed1997

Using the GRAIL language for classification management.

This paper describes a novel approach in classification management where a formal model of medical semantics is being used for manipulations on existing classification systems. The paper addresses the issue of semi-automatically making specialist classifications that are compatible with the source classification. The examples in this paper are from a limited domain. At the time of the presentation results will be shown of the present modelling work within the GALEN-In-Use project. The model will then contain several thousands of medical procedures from four different classification centres.

Classification↗