We have heard of business intelligence, but what is clinical intelligence? It is a research and engineering discipline dedicated to the development of tools for data analysis. These tools are used for clinical research, surveillance, and effective health care management.

7th Space Interactive brought this interesting topic to our attention in their article, “Semantic querying of relational data for clinical intelligence: a semantic web services-based approach.” One challenge of clinical intelligence is self-service ad hoc querying of clinical data. Semantic querying in which the user formulates queries in terms of domain ontologies is possibly the solution. It would be easier to navigate and recover.

Melody K. Smith

Sponsored by Access Innovations, the world leader in thesaurus, ontology, and taxonomy creation and metadata application.