An Ontology Based Framework for Modeling Healthcare Teams

Abstract

Advantages of applying information and communication technologies to support complex team practices in healthcare domain have often been supported in the extant literature. The primary assumption is that before putting any technologies in place to support team functions, the team-based environment should be completely modeled. To date, many frameworks have been proposed for modeling healthcare teams; however, most of the frameworks only focus on single or a few aspects of teamwork and the outcomes usually present overlaps, limitations and inconsistencies. As a result, there is an increasing demand for offering an overarching framework that integrates the multiple dimensions of healthcare teamwork into a synthetic whole and clearly conceptualizes the potentially important relationships and dependencies that exist over those dimensions. In order to properly address the aforementioned challenge, this thesis applies ontological engineering to develop an overarching framework for integrating the multiple dimensions of teamwork concept in healthcare domain. For this purpose, we first illustrate a set of four stage methodological approach to provide explicit details on how to incorporate a theatrical foundation into the ontology. Then, the proposed approach is used to develop a derived ontological framework. Finally, accuracy and completeness of the proposed ontology based framework is validated to show that it is able to accurately represent the domain is it being employed for. The values and capabilities of ontology have already been studied and approved, and this technology is known as the best sources to represent a knowledge domain by means of concepts and accurately define the relationships among them. Our aim in this thesis is to further research how to develop and evaluate a standard ontology based framework to facilitate the healthcare team modeling.