Abstract:

• Government Health IT Conference

Ontolog Forum Abstract - Summary Paper and Presentation on August 25, 2005 Health Informatics Panel Discussion

Abstract as submitted:

The Ontolog Forum is pleased to submit this abstract for a Presentation and Paper summarizing our Panel Discussion scheduled for August 25, 2005 on the topic: Healthcare Informatics Landscapes, Roadmaps, and Blueprints: Towards a Business Case Strategy for Large Scale Ontology Projects

Presenter: Brand Niemann, Ph.D.: chair, Semantic Interoperability Community of Practice, EPA Computer Scientist, XML and Web Services Specialist This presentation will provide a summary of the Panel Discussion held August 25, 2005 on the topic cited. The criteria covered below will emerge from the results of the panel discussion. Our speakers are willing to participate in a panel discussion on this topic.

At the time of submission of this abstract the panelists confirmed and pending are:

• Dr. Mark Musen, Director Stanford Medical Informatics—confirmed;
• Bob Smith, Professor Emeritus, California State University--confirmed,
• Marc Wine, GSA Office of Intergovernmental Solutions-confirmed;
• David Whitten, WorldVistA, Co-founder; Public Domain Knowledge Bank--pending,
• Brett Trusko, OASIS Healthcare Industry Consultant—pending;
• Dr. Christopher Chute, OMG-HL7—pending;
• Esther Dyson—pending.

For our summary we will focus on how ontology-based semantic web technologies can help health IT managers to transform health care with innovative and effective approaches that address the president’s mandate for citizen-centered e-government. We will point out how the strategies embodied in such tools as OpenVistA pave the way for implementing customer-focused, collaborative management approaches in health care organizations through a fairly standard set of vocabularies and datamodels.

This approach will explain how ontolgies help establish an interoperable environment for more affordable health care and how ontologies help develop more patient-centric systems with sufficient safeguards to protect privacy and personal health information.

We will also discuss how ontologies help align incentives in a health information networkby allowing harmonization of standards and policies, correctly identify patients and link individuals to their information, implement electronic record keeping and reduce the reliance on paper records to improve health care, increase efficiency, avoid medical errors, and reduce costs. Our summary will include a discussion of how to implement an architecture that uses the Internet and is linked by uniform communications and a software framework of open standards and policies.

150-word Synopsis:

The 150-word synopsis does not appear as a separate text field, unless it is intended to be half of the 300-word abstract, so we address that here by saying that our panel discussion is intended to reveal how ontological management practices using open standards, specifically XML and RDF/OWL, are enabling a healthcare IT system that is both less redundant and more efficient, saving money and time while providing better care with greater security and privacy. This is of compelling interest to the entire Healthcare Industry from practitioners to financial planners because it holds the promise of improvement both in healthcare delivery, especially during emergencies, and in cost savings to all concerned parties.