Clinical knowledge modeling: An essential step in the digital transformation of healthcare

The current healthcare system is labor intensive and relies heavily on the skills, knowledge, experience, and direct involvement of its individual human employees. It has thus acquired a reputation for being difficult to digitize and automate, making it challenging to achieve increases in productivity and efficiency. What makes automating or otherwise digitally supporting this work so difficult? The problem is that, to be implemented in automation, knowledge must be both structured and explicit, which is often not the case in the medical domain. This paper describes our method for the explicit structuring of medical knowledge in clinical knowledge models (CKMs). These may be utilized as the building blocks for automation and decision support in medicine.