MIP Participation Manual

MEDICAL INFORMATICS PLATFORM

Participation Manual
About the Manual

Welcome! Your keen spirit and curiosity is truly refreshing. To better guide
you in your contribution in the MIP Project, our Medical Knowledge
Engineering team has brought you this Training Manual! As you
go along, you will see just how quick and easy it is to participate!

In this manual, you will find:

SECTION PAGE

1.0 THE PROJECT: What is MIP? 2

2.0 KNOWLEDGE BUILDING: Why the Project Needs You 4

3.0 METHOD: How You Can Participate! 5

3.1 Case Contribution 6

3.2 Knowledge Transfer Procedure 6

3.3 Submission 10

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1.0 The Project: What is MIP?

MIP is the acronym for the “Medical Informatics Platform”, a

revolutionary new program being developed to aid students, clinicians and
researchers in their decision making processes using cutting edge ‘semantic’
technologies developed for designing intelligent databases.

So what does this mean for you? Well… Let’s say you’re a hard
working medical student doing your internship or are on your clinical rounds and you come
across a patient or a case you are not familiar with, and time is of the essence, you would
have to make a quick, effective & accurate decision. What would be done in such a scenario?
You would have the following options:
a. Quickly run through your notes to make sure your decision is
accurate,
b. Use an electronic source if that is available,
c. Ask someone with more knowledge on the subject matter, or
d. Scroll through your nifty encyclopedia program on your
overpriced PDA.

In all of these choices though, the information (if readily available) still needs to be
sorted and processed with some amount of human intelligence to make sure that information
will be useful.

1.1 WHAT CAN IT DO FOR YOU ?

MIP is designed with an intuitive interface that makes access to

relevant information easy. The program is being developed in
JAVA enabling it to be run on any operating system from PDAs to
cellphones. The interface is being designed to accommodate the
touch screen feature to facilitate on-the-fly access to relevant information.

The goal of the MIP program is to assist in the diagnosis of either a common or
uncommon disease based on the same decision making process that is used by a clinician in
diagnosing a specific disease.

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2.0 KNOWLEDGE BUILDING: Why You’re Important!

To be a truly reliable assistant, the MIP first needs to be equipped with a strong
knowledge base; just as seasoned experts and professionals need to undergo intensive
education and training before their service. However, medical knowledge is incredibly vast
and fast-growing, so transferring this knowledge into a mobile tool would be quite a task! This
is where we turn to community participation in supporting the MIP with a wealth of relevant,
credible medical contents. The intensive exposure that you, discerning medical students, house
officers, and senior clinicians receive in your practice is really something worth sharing for our
Project. After all, it’s aimed at making healthcare work better for YOU!

The ‘mind’ of the MIP will be the Disease Knowledge Bases ranging from Anemia to even
Zoster, containing the major steps in diagnosis which are:

1. Symptoms experienced by the Patient

2. Clinical signs exhibited
3. Investigative methods, and
4. Management of the disease.

Your help is thus needed right here, in expanding the MIP’s knowledge beginning with
clinical cases encountered in your own line of practice. Not only does this enlarge the
knowledge bases, the context of this knowledge will also be relevant to others working in the
local arena!

As more knowledge is contributed to the MIP, its special design using semantic technology
enables it to intelligently recognize and understand knowledge intuitively. Just like the human
mind, it will be able to actually reason out relationships and come up at logical conclusions to
help you in the direst situations. With on-the-fly processing, it’s almost as handy as having a
reference textbook that knows what you’re looking for, or a knowledgeable supervisor who’s
never tired and always by your side (only no casual conversations just yet we’re afraid!).

With that said, let’s look at how you can start playing your role in the Project!

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3.0 METHOD: How You Can Participate!

We need your help in order to populate the databases with current and accurate
medical information. This is what the flow of information looks like, from the time we get it
from you, until it is encoded into the knowledge base. The MKE’s refers to the Medical
Knowledge Engineers who are the same people who have drafted this training manual and
will be conducting the training workshops.

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3.1 CASE CONTRIBUTION

Since the objective of the MIP is to contain practical medical information locally in MALAYSIA,
we would want to populate the knowledge bases with diseases that are mostly prevalent in
Malaysia. In this way the MIP would be most useful to the local professionals.

Fig 3.1 – General Process Flow

3.2 KNOWLEDGE TRANSFER PROCEDURE

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The following steps would have to be done in order to translate the clinical case report
into the excel file that shall be submitted to the MKE’s. For illustration picture a clinical scenario
where you have diagnosed a patient with Melioidosis and a detailed case report was drafted
justifying the diagnosis.

Step 1 – Structuring the information (Scope Creation)

The clinical case report which has been validated by a superior will be divided into 4 columns
into the following format.

3.2 (a) – Column Structure for categorizing clinical case reports

So, it would look like this (Template available at http://mkestuff.blogspot.com)

3.2 (b) – Scope

Please note that for each case you will create one of these tables.

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Step 2 – Excel file creation

After creating the scope, an Excel Workbook (file) will be created. The Template for this
Workbook is available at http://mkestuff.blogspot.com.

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Fig 3.2(c) – Excel File Template (available at http://mkestuff.blogspot.com)

Fig 3.2(d) – Column formatting guide

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Fig 3.2(e) – Important Formatting points

Important point to consider when creating the Excel Workbook [Fig 3.2(e)]
1. Each case would ultimately end up as multiple sheets in one workbook.
2. The symptoms column in Fig 3.2(b) would be in one sheet with the headings as
illustrated in Fig 3.2 (c) & Fig 3.2 (d)

3.3 SUBMISSION

File format for the Scope and the Excel Workbook should be in either:
a. Microsoft Office 97-2003 (*.doc and *.xls) OR
b. Microsoft Office 2007 (*.docx and *.xlsx)

For naming your files, follow this format:

“FirstName_LastName_Date.doc (or xls)” or “FirstName_LastName_Date.docx (or xlsx)”

E.g. Ms. Haifa Wehbe’s Excel Workbook created on 29th Sept 2009 would be named
either “Haifa_Wehbe_290909.xls” or “Haifa_Wehbe_290909.xlsx” accordingly.

Once the files are created please email them to kestuff@gmail.com.

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Congratulations, now you are ready to create your first Disease Scope and
Workbook—and contribute your first Disease to the Project! For further aid, reference and
also contact with the MKEs, visit the “MKE Stuff” page at http://mkestuff.blogspot.com and
check out the video Tutorials, File Templates and helpful entries. Your comments and questions
are most welcome!

Regards,

The Medical Knowledge Engineers

In-Fusion Solutions

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