Diagnosis, misdiagnosis, lucky guess, hearsay, and more: an ontological analysis.

Journal: Journal of biomedical semantics
Published Date:

Abstract

BACKGROUND: Disease and diagnosis have been the subject of much ontological inquiry. However, the insights gained therein have not yet been well enough applied to the study, management, and improvement of data quality in electronic health records (EHR) and administrative systems. Data in these systems suffer from workarounds clinicians are forced to apply due to limitations in the current state-of-the art in system design which ignore the various types of entities that diagnoses as information content entities can be and are about. This leads to difficulties in distinguishing amongst diagnostic assertions misdiagnosis from correct diagnosis, and the former from coincidentally correct statements about disease.

Authors

  • William R Hogan
    Department of Health Outcomes and Biomedical Informatics.
  • Werner Ceusters
    Department of Biomedical Informatics, University at Buffalo, NY, USA.