Expanding DIOGENE with a clinical information system based on a new hospital-wide clinical findings dictionary.

The DIOGENE hospital information system has been expanded with a centralized and integrated patient clinical database recording structured patient data. The objective is to provide a standardized framework for the building of future clinical databases and for the integration of existing heterogeneous ones. The combined 'across time view' and 'across departments view' generated from the integrated clinical data will enable an evolutionary view of the patient state, both across time and across medical specialties. For this purpose and to permit the communication and exchange of data, a new controlled vocabulary for representing clinical data has been created. The construction of this vocabulary is based on the international ICD classification, already being used in DIOGENE for encoding patient diagnosis and procedures. A new extension of the ICD is proposed for medical information that goes beyond diagnosis and procedures encoding. The building of a common clinical findings dictionary, recording the definition of clinical entities, is based on this newly developed clinical vocabulary. This process is incremental, manual and substantial.

A hospital-wide clinical findings dictionary based on an extension of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD).

The use of a controlled vocabulary set in a hospital-wide clinical information system is of crucial importance for many departmental database systems to communicate and exchange information. In the absence of an internationally recognized clinical controlled vocabulary set, a new extension of the International statistical Classification of Diseases (ICD) is proposed. It expands the scope of the standard ICD beyond diagnosis and procedures to clinical terminology. In addition, the common Clinical Findings Dictionary (CFD) further records the definition of clinical entities. The construction of the vocabulary set and the CFD is incremental and manual. Tools have been implemented to facilitate the tasks of defining/maintaining/publishing dictionary versions. The design of database applications in the integrated clinical information system is driven by the CFD which is part of the Medical Questionnaire Designer tool. Several integrated clinical database applications in the field of diabetes and neuro-surgery have been developed at the HUG.

[Internet for physicians: a tool for today and tomorrow ]. / Internet pour les médecins: un outil d'aujourd'hui et de demain.

The Internet is becoming more and more part of our habits regarding documentation and communication, thus limiting the frontiers to only that of the language. As in many other fields, the Internet is also present in the medical domain. The Internet is accessible to all, providing a technology which is simple and ergonomic and furthermore less costly. A growing number of individuals are indeed offering information, and the multiplication and diversification of documentary thus resulting renders the quality often questionable and the search for information difficult. This article firstly presents the Internet services with examples in the medical domain and more particularly in paediatrics. It then identifies the problems related to the Internet and further details three tools useful to find medical information and to surf on the Internet: Medline, a bibliographical reference search tool (from the National Library of Medicine-NLM); Medhunt, a search tool of the Health on the Net Foundation specialised in the health domain; and the HONcode, a code of ethics developed to homogenize medical information on the Internet.

Expanding DIOGENE with a clinical information system based on a new hospital-wide clinical finding dictionary.

The aim of this project is to expand DIOGENE with a centralized and integrated patient clinical database system providing a standardized framework for the building of future clinical databases and for the integration of existing heterogeneous ones. The combined 'across time view' and 'across departments view' generated from the integrated clinical data will enable an evolutionary view of the patient state both across time and across medical specialties. For this purpose and to permit the communication and exchange of data, a new controlled vocabulary for representing clinical data has been created. The construction of this vocabulary is based on the international ICD classification, already being used in DIOGENE for encoding patient diagnosis and procedures. A new extension of the ICD is proposed for medical information that goes beyond diagnosis and procedures encoding. The building of a common clinical finding dictionary recording the definition of findings is based on this newly developed clinical vocabulary. This process is incremental, manual, and significant.

The doctor's view on education and training aspects of secure communication.

Using two examples of installed applications that are widely spread in a large teaching hospital, the awareness of secure communication is highlighted. Teaching to the rotating medical staff is organised on a regular basis. The physicians learn the responsibility they accept when entering the hospital information system (HIS). In a distributed environment, the confidentiality aspects change with the technology when the users perform with on-line helps and graphical interfaces.

Knowledge sources for Natural Language Processing.

This paper aims at reviewing the problem of feeding Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools with convenient linguistic knowledge in the medical domain. A syntactic approach lacks the potential to solve a number of typical situations with ambiguities and is clearly insufficient for quality treatment of natural language. On the other hand, a conceptual approach relies on some modelling of the domain, of which the elaboration is d long-term process and where the ultimate solutions are far from being recognised and universally accepted. In-between is the beauty of the compromise. How can we significantly improve the coverage of linguistic knowledge in the years to come?