Effective chronic disease management ensures
better treatment and reduces medical costs.
Representing knowledge through building an ontology
for Electronic Medical Records (EMRs) is important to
achieve semantic interoperability among healthcare
information systems and to better execute decision
support systems. In this paper, an ontology-based EMR
focusing on Chronic Disease Management is proposed.
The W3C Computer-based Patient Record ontology
[7] is customized and augmented with concepts and
attributes from the Western Health Infostructure
Canada chronic disease management model [2] and
the American Society for Testing and Materials
International EHR. The result is an EMR ontology
capable of representing knowledge about chronic
disease. All of the clinical actions of the proposed
ontology were found to map to HL7 RIM classes. Such
an EMR ontology for chronic disease management can
support reasoning for clinical decision support systems
as well as act as a switching language from one EMR
standard to another for chronic disease knowledge.