title: Improving the human readability of Arden Syntax medical logic modules using a concept-oriented terminology and object-oriented programming expressions.
abstract: Medical logic modules are a procedural representation for sharing task-specific knowledge for decision support systems. Based on the premise that clinicians may perceive object-oriented expressions as easier to read than procedural rules in Arden Syntax-based medical logic modules, we developed a method for improving the readability of medical logic modules. Two approaches were applied: exploiting the concept-oriented features of the Medical Entities Dictionary and building an executable Java program to replace Arden Syntax procedural expressions. The usability evaluation showed that 66% of participants successfully mapped all Arden Syntax rules to Java methods. These findings suggest that these approaches can play an essential role in the creation of human readable medical logic modules and can potentially increase the number of clinical experts who are able to participate in the creation of medical logic modules. Although our approaches are broadly applicable, we specifically discuss the relevance to concept-oriented nursing terminologies and automated processing of task-specific nursing knowledge.
authors.affiliation: Department of Biomedical Informatics, Columbia University, New York, NY 10032, USA. jc2293@columbia.edu
authors.forename: Jeeyae
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Choi
authors.forename: Suzanne
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Bakken
authors.forename: Yves A
authors.initials: YA
authors.lastname: Lussier
authors.forename: Eneida A
authors.initials: EA
authors.lastname: Mendonça
mesh_terms: D001291:Attitude of Health Personnel; D001292:Attitude to Computers; D032882:Comprehension; D020000:Decision Support Systems, Clinical / Q000458:organization & administration*; D004018:Dictionaries, Medical as Topic; D005103:Expert Systems; D006751:Hospital Information Systems / Q000458:organization & administration; D006801:Humans; D051188:Knowledge Bases; D008505:Medical Staff, Hospital / Q000523:psychology; D009323:Natural Language Processing; D009518:New York; D015403:Nursing Evaluation Research; D048108:Nursing Informatics; D015404:Nursing Methodology Research; D009741:Nursing Staff, Hospital / Q000523:psychology; D015397:Program Evaluation; D011381:Programming Languages; D017010:Reminder Systems; D018875:Vocabulary, Controlled