Public domain Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) patient database

This document has presented a research work under the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) design and its conceptual framework as well as its experimental implementation has been introduced. Three hypotheses have been proposed and tested with real patient cases from two hospital information systems (HELP and VA). Primary conclusions of this work were: (1) The total number of MOI entries will not grow indefinitely. For a given domain, it tends to level-off as more data sources are added. (2) To date, Event Definition structures can correctly represent a selected subset of dictionary entries ranging from 83% to 99%. (3) The current automatic instantiation algorithm has proven to have an 87% success rate. (4) From the evidence shown using this prototype with the UMLS patient database, it is possible to combine electronic patient records from different patient information systems into a unified structure. Moreover, this prototype allows the user to visually inspect the distribution of relevant medical variables which demonstrates discrimination between disease and nondisease groups independent of the source of data. Also, several vital future enhancements were also discussed.