TIMING IS EVERYTHING - TIME-ORIENTED CLINICAL INFORMATION-SYSTEMS

Time is important in clinical information systems. Representing, maint aining, querying, and reasoning about time-oriented clinical data is a major theoretical and practical research area in medical informatics. In this nonexhaustive overview, we present a brief synopsis of resear ch efforts in designing and developing time-oriented information syste ms in medicine. These efforts can be viewed from either an application point of view, distinguishing between different clinical tasks (such as diagnosis versus therapy) and clinical areas (such as infectious di seases versus oncology), or a methodological point of view, distinguis hing between different theoretical approaches. We also explore the two primary methodological and theoretical paths research has taken in th e past decade: temporal reasoning and temporal data maintenance. Both of these research areas include efforts to model time, temporal entiti es, and temporal queries. Collaboration between the two areas is possi ble, through tasks such as the abstraction of raw time-oriented clinic al data into higher-level meaningful clinical concepts and the managem ent of different levels of temporal granularity. Such collaboration co uld provide a common ground and useful areas for future research and d evelopment. We conclude with our view of future research directions.