Abstract

Medical histories accumulate data on the patient's health background and the history of disease progression. However, methods to systematically mine this data are not yet available. The emerging field of Computational Health Informatics aims to optimize patient care utilizing computational techniques to assess information and knowledge needs of health care professionals and patient as well as characterize, evaluate, and refine clinical processes. Here, we present a computational technique that translates medical histories into object models as a first step towards a formal database of medical records. This direction aims to construct a formal database of medical intakes to combine the natural history preceding the disease, the diagnosis and the treatment. We first discuss a conceptual example to illustrate the approach and then detail an object model that extracts data from an actual new patient intake record of a person suspected of having Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS). The object model yields a preliminary formal designated vocabulary for CFS development that provides a basis for future formalism of these records. Finally, we discuss future directions and benefits that could arise from these kind of efforts. While the example used here is CFS the methodology can be expanded to formalize and study medical records in general.

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