Understanding effective clinical communication in medical errors.

Clinical Communication failures are considered the leading cause of medical errors [1]. Minimizing communication problems among clinical team members could directly reduce medical errors and hence, increase patient safety and improve health care quality. Our main focus is, through knowledge representation approach, to develop an understanding of communication problems applied to health care settings. This will serve as the foundation to our long term goal of building an ontology-driven educational tool that will be used to educate clinicians about miscommunication issues and as a means to improve it.