Semantic data dictionary for annotating performance indicators for hospital management

Abstract

Introduction: Hospital management is a fundamental activity to comply with laws and regulations, especially in times of health crisis. Management strategies use different indicators (KPI or Key Performance Indicator) to control the processes within a hospital. KPIs in this segment can be the occupancy rate (daily or monthly), patient permanence index, patient renewal index or the list of hospitalized patients for disease classifications, among others. The management of the data generated by the indicators aims to support decision making and improve health services provided by the organization. Good data naming practices avoid incompatible data combinations so as not to compromise decision making. Method: It was applied in this article aims to put in practice a systematic process to prepare and integrate data from hospital indicators based on ontological modeling. Results: A process for semantic annotation of data supported by SDD (Semantic Data Dictionary) technique, which uses metadata templates to facilitate the preparation, integration and reuse of data in the hospital area, specifically for the average length of stay indicator. Conclusions: The use of ontologies in semantic annotation allows disambiguation of terms and preserves the semantics of values extracted from KPIs and opens the way for ingesting hospital KPI data from different data sources in the hospital network (public and private). Finally, the presented approach contributes to data curation, since the SDD technique follows good practices for data management in different areas.