| Nurses play a vital role in providing patient care. Nursing Care Plans and Clinical Practice Guidelines promote an evidence-based standardized form of patient care, but their current form does not allow patient-centered care. Our solution is to computerize them in terms of fine-grained activity-specific components---the systematic composition of multiple activity specific components yields a patient-centered 'Care Plan'. In this research, we investigated and modeled the structure and function of Nursing Care Plans and Guidelines as a generic high-level model. Taking a Semantic Web approach, we adapted the METHONTOLOGY methodology for ontology engineering to develop an OWL-based ontology. Using it we instantiated a set of Nursing Care Plans and Guidelines that can now be executed using reasoning methods and data inputs, to generate individualized care plans comprising of step-by-step instructions. The ontology was successfully evaluated for representational accuracy and completeness using a set of test Nursing Care Plans and Guidelines. |
