Ontological Principles of Disease Management from Public Health Perspective: a Tuberculosis Case Study

Formal ontological representation of clinical conditions and disease management is a key methodology ensuring that the complex knowledge of disease treatment, control and prevention can be represented, stored and accessed in the most appropriate way to help the medical professionals in their decision making. This is of particular importance for the public health domain where the concern is about the affect of the disease on populations rather than individuals. The existing evidence-based knowledge can best be used by professionals if incorporated into care pathways (formal or informal) which relate the sequence of actions necessary for accurate management of diseases to the progression of the illness and treatment. Therefore, there is a need for an ontological framework to be built around care pathways in order to allow the professionals to access the most relevant information at the time of making a decision. In this paper we will illustrate a Tuberculosis (TB) care pathway, as developed at City University, and show how a formal ontological representation can, in principle, serve the needs of information retrieval around this particular disease.