Using an object-oriented database management system to store clinical information

This thesis explores the use of an object-oriented database system to implement the Event Model of clinical information. It also extends the basic model by the use of object-oriented information modeling techniques. An attempt has been made to show that the expressive capabilities of object-oriented database systems facilitates a natural and direct implementation of the Event Model. Database design was guided by two ideas: (1) that there is an underlying structure to all clinical data and (2) that objects residing within the database should provide interfaces to a variety or services. These services include decision support, information delivery and data exchange. The clinical domain explored was laboratory medicine. Common decision-support queries were run against the laboratory data stored in the object-oriented database. These queries were then expressed in the relational database language SQL; the two sets of queries were compared with each other. Several conclusions may be drawn from this work. The size of the conceptual space of medical information requires the building of a medical concepts database to support the constrain of Event schema. The use of an object-oriented programming language can provide a simple way of implementing the taxonomic nature of clinical data and of enforcing referential integrity constraints present in the model.