An ontology for unexpected events and actions in chronic patient home care protocol

A health care protocol for a chronic disease contains a set of actions that describe how the patient should treat his/her disease outside the hospital. The patient and possibly his healthcare team should follow the protocol in order to control the evolution of the chronic disease. The main problems are that (i) the patient can't interact and integrate in the protocol the expertise he acquired during his daily life with the disease and (ii) the health care team doesn't know how the protocol is concretely followed. Our main contribution in this paper is an approach for integrating the patient's expertise knowledge expressed in textual or verbal form, and representing this expertise with an ontological paradigm.