Hurley, Katrina
Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/10222/37729
Browse
Recent Submissions
Item Open Access What are Canadian Medical Students Learning about Health Informatics(2011) Hurley, Katrina F.; Taylor, Brett; Postuma, Paul; Paterson, GraceObjective: To perform an environmental scan of health informatics teaching practices in Canadian medical schools as part of a quality improvement initiative at Dalhousie University’s Faculty of Medicine. Methodology: We contacted undergraduate medical education staff at all seventeen Canadian medical schools and, via e-mail, asked open-ended questions about informatics content in the curriculum, timing of content delivery, teaching methodologies and informatics faculty. Results: Sixteen of seventeen medical schools answered our queries. Each school identified curricular content on information literacy and evaluation of evidence but identified no formal core curriculum in health informatics. Conclusions: As of 2009, health informatics had not yet penetrated formal undergraduate medical curricula in Canada. Efforts to introduce health informatics initiatives should take into account the lack of understanding of the discipline of health informatics by educators and the densely packed nature of medical curricula. A new Canadian project, involving the Association of Faculties of Medicine of Canada and Canada Health Infoway, offers promise for building new health informatics curricula within undergraduate medical education.Item Open Access Ontology Engineering to Model Clinical Pathways: Towards the Computerization and Execution of Clinical Pathways(IEEE, 2007) Hurley, Katrina F.; Abidi, Syed Sibte RazaClinical pathways translate evidence-based recommendations into locally practicable, process-specific algorithms that reduce practice variations and optimize quality of care. Our objective was to abstract practice-oriented knowledge from a cohort of real clinical pathways and represent this knowledge as a clinical pathway ontology. We employed a four step methodology: (1) knowledge source identification and classification of clinical pathways according to variations in setting, stage of care, patient type, outcome and specialty; (2) iterative knowledge abstraction using grounded theory; (3) ontology engineering as adapted from the Model-based Incremental Knowledge Engineering approach; and, (4) ontology evaluation through encoding a sample of real clinical pathways. We present our Clinical Pathway Ontology that offers a detailed ontological model describing the structure and function of clinical pathways. Our ontology can potentially integrate with a healthcare semantic web, and ontologies for clinical practice guidelines, patients and institutions to form the foundational knowledge for generating patient-specific CarePlans.