| abstract |
A system and method for using heterogeneous data from multiple healthcare information sources in a medical decision support system is disclosed. Each healthcare information system stores medical data using a different local schema. The medical decision support system provides responses to user queries. A query is received from a user that is generated in a standardized global schema. The query includes information from medical ontologies. Database queries are generated from the user queries that use the medical ontologies to generate constraints in the queries. The medical ontologies are also used to infer database queries. The generated query is translated into multiple queries for the multiple healthcare systems wherein each query is in the local schema of the healthcare information system that is being queried. Each database query is transmitted to one of the healthcare information systems based on the local schema of the particular query. Data is collected from each of the queried healthcare information system and analyzed. A query response is formulated for the user |