Integrated clinical decision support using an object-oriented database management system.

Clinical decision support systems assist in diagnosis, alert to abnormal conditions, and manage patient data. Such systems tend to emphasize one of these features at the expense of the others and tend to be developed on an ad hoc basis. In this work, a technique is developed for creating an integrated clinical decision support system wholly within a general-purpose object-oriented database management system. The diagnostic and alerting requirements are accomplished with encapsulated methods and a novel use of the object-oriented database management class-hierarchy structure. The patient data management requirement is satisfied by the normal data management capabilities of the object-oriented DBMS.