AN EVENT MODEL OF MEDICAL INFORMATION REPRESENTATION

Objective: Develop a model for structured and encoded representation o f medical information that supports human review, decision support app lications, ad hoc queries, statistical analysis, and natural-language processing. Design: A medical information representation model was dev eloped from manual and semiautomated analysis of patient data. The key assumption of the model is that medical information can be represente d as a series of linked events. The event representation has two main components. The first component is a frame or template definition that specifies the attributes of the event. The second component is a stru ctured vocabulary, the terms of which are taken as the values of the s lots in the event template structure. Individual event instances are l inked by specific named relationships. Results: The proposed model was used to represent a chest-radiograph report. Conclusions: The event m odel of medical information representation provides a mechanism for fo rmal definition of the logical structure of medical data and allows ex plicit time-oriented and associative relationships between event insta nces.