Representing medical concepts

Illustrates the importance of achieving key strategic goals for the next decade of medical informatics, and describes key milestones towards achieving these goals. A major barrier to these tasks is the lack of an effective reusable representation for medical concepts. This problem is well known. It has even been cited as one of the grand challenges facing medical informatics. Why has it been so hard to solve? We cite two sets of reasons: (i) organisational and economic, and (ii) technical. The GALEN programme addresses both sets of issues. GALEN grew out of work on the user-centred design of clinical systems. It remains focused on practical problems of supporting real clinical systems, the first commercial examples of which are to appear in mid-1996. However, to achieve this, it has had to make significant technical innovations in the paradigm for delivering clinical terminology and in its formal representation. The heart of GALEN's approach is a novel description logic, GRAIL (GALEN Representation And Integration Language). GRAIL's design includes features to overcome previous difficulties and to support GALEN's fundamental strategies for reusability.