Towards Knowledge Management in Intensive Care Units

Nowadays, the importance of Knowledge Management is growing in the Information Society. Managing knowledge in healthcare environments has been considered very important by the scientific community. Patients on Intensive Care Units need continuous attention and monitoring. The patient may be connected to an alarm system, so that an alarm is triggered when the state of the patient changes. Traditional monitoring systems have the problem of the existence of superfluous and unnecessary alarms. In this work, an ontology-based system for managing clinical knowledge (i.e., patients, alarms, physicians, equipment) in Intensive Care Units is presented. One of our objectives is to be capable of checking in every moment whether the patient meets some diagnostic hypothesis in order to keep track of his/her correct evolution. Another objective pursued here was to perform the checking process in an efficient way, avoiding the superfluous alarms.