Modelling of clinical information using object oriented approach

Access to medical information by health professionals during medical care has critical importance for quality of medical care and administration of health institutions. Clinical data must be reliable and updated and accessible in a short time when required. Design and usage of clinical information systems have been remained insufficient and their dissemination is very limited when compared to financial and administrative medical systems. The main reasons of this situation are complexity of medical data and failure to recognize this complexity. Present clinical information systems usually collects data by unstructured data entry interfaces, free text based entries, and they do not have hierarchical structure. Thus, the stored data is difficult to be queried, reproduced, and converted to information. There is no structured, modelled clinical data set in Turkish. In this study, the aim is to develop a model design for clinical data and to develop a clinical oncologic data model including its subdomains of chemotherapy and radiotherapy. Oncologic domain data was analysed by object oriented approach and clinical data modelling has been performed. The model is documented using OpenSDE modelling editor. Clinical oncology domain data set which was produced in this study is expected to be an example for data modelling in other clinical domains and to assist the design of clinical information systems.