Ontology-driven development of a clinical research information system

Clinicians at Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust have developed a clinical information model that enables detailed patient data to be gathered in clinics, stored in a patient record, linked with samples in a Biobank and then used to identify and select patient cohorts for research studies. The objective has been to enable the assembly of cohorts based on any plausible combination of clinical and laboratory features. The model is represented as an ontology, coded in OWL/XML and is itself built upon an ontology-based information architecture. The model can be used to generate the runtime configuration and operational data structures for a clinical information system, which has been implemented using an open source toolkit developed at City University, London.