A work domain ontology for modeling emergency department workflow

Emergency Department clinicians perform life-critical tasks that require acquisition, processing, transmission, distribution, integration, search, and archiving of significant amount of data in a distributed team environment in a timely manner. In order to better reveal the complexity of emergency care and reflect such a complexity in information system design, we need an abstract description of the clinical and cognitive work performed by clinicians, independent of how the clinical setting is implemented with specific technology, artifacts, and environmental variables. For this purpose, we developed a work domain ontology for the ED (ED-WDO). We evaluated the semantics of the ED-WDO with domain experts and its application and usage using an emergency nurse assessment use case. From the evaluation results, we can conclude that the lexical and semantic definitions of the classes, the hierarchical structure, as well as the semantic relation definitions in the ED-WDO are well defined and can faithfully represent the ED work domain.