L.I.M.
En Français
Experience of existing Hospital Informations Systems (HISs) highlights the fact that most relevant medical information is stored in narrative form, in Patient Discharge Summaries (PDSs). These PDSs aim at the transmission of the minimal but sufficient set of data to be used for the next visit of the patient. They are dictated, and stored on the computer by the secretary. The overal goal of this project is to provide better access to this information through a variety of services called "MENELAS". The strong underlying hypothesis we support is that better access to information allows better quality of stored medical information and leads to better use of HIS. These services should hence improve cost and quality of health care:
Faced with an atypical patient, clinicians can search the stored reports for patients with similar characteristics, and find the treatments they received [diagnosis aid].
Nomenclature codes are automatically produced for each report, and can be included in standardised discharge summaries [medico-administrative management].
Public health researchers can test clinical research hypotheses on the basis of the available patient sample [clinical research and public health].
Menelas is a multilingual project involving French, English and Dutch. The system employs techniques from the Artificial Intelligence and Computational Linguistics communities that draw on linguistic, commonsense and medical domain knowledge sources in order to transform ordinary texts into a calculable form. Menelas will not only enable access by contents to patient discharge summaries, but also, when appropriate, produce a standardised representation of extracted information, in the form of international nomenclature codes: ICD-9-CM codes (International Classification of Diseases). The system is designed with a concern for extensibility to different application domains; it is tested in the domain of coronary diseases. Started in January 1992, the project will end in December 1994.
The Document Indexing System, whose core is a Natural Language Analysis system, analyses a patient discharge summary and stores it in a database as a set of conceptual structures. It also produces nomenclature codes (ICD-9-CM) and documentary indexes. This process does not require interactive human intervention and can be run in batch mode.
The Consultation System allows physicians and department administration staff to access the contents of the database through an intelligent and user-friendly interface.
The administrator system, also known as the system management tools (SMT), helps the person in charge of an application in a hospital department to customize the knowledge base of the system in order to set up a new application or to modify the knowledge base of an existing application.
L.I.M.