An Ontology to Bridge the Clinical Management of Patients and Public Health Responses for Strengthening Infectious Disease Surveillance: Design Science Study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Novel surveillance approaches using digital technologies, including the Internet of Things (IoT), have evolved, enhancing traditional infectious disease surveillance systems by enabling real-time detection of outbreaks and reaching a wider population. However, disparate, heterogenous infectious disease surveillance systems often operate in silos due to a lack of interoperability. As a life-changing clinical use case, the COVID-19 pandemic has manifested that a lack of interoperability can severely inhibit public health responses to emerging infectious diseases. Interoperability is thus critical for building a robust ecosystem of infectious disease surveillance and enhancing preparedness for future outbreaks. The primary enabler for semantic interoperability is ontology. OBJECTIVE: This study aims to design the IoT-based management of infectious disease ontology (IoT-MIDO) to enhance data sharing and integration of data collected from IoT-driven patient health monitoring, clinical management of individual patients, and disparate heterogeneous infectious disease surveillance. METHODS: The ontology modeling approach was chosen for its semantic richness in knowledge representation, flexibility, ease of extensibility, and capability for knowledge inference and reasoning. The IoT-MIDO was developed using the basic formal ontology (BFO) as the top-level ontology. We reused the classes from existing BFO-based ontologies as much as possible to maximize the interoperability with other BFO-based ontologies and databases that rely on them. We formulated the competency questions as requirements for the ontology to achieve the intended goals. RESULTS: We designed an ontology to integrate data from heterogeneous sources, including IoT-driven patient monitoring, clinical management of individual patients, and infectious disease surveillance systems. This integration aims to facilitate the collaboration between clinical care and public health domains. We also demonstrate five use cases using the simplified ontological models to show the potential applications of IoT-MIDO: (1) IoT-driven patient monitoring, risk assessment, early warning, and risk management; (2) clinical management of patients with infectious diseases; (3) epidemic risk analysis for timely response at the public health level; (4) infectious disease surveillance; and (5) transforming patient information into surveillance information. CONCLUSIONS: The development of the IoT-MIDO was driven by competency questions. Being able to answer all the formulated competency questions, we successfully demonstrated that our ontology has the potential to facilitate data sharing and integration for orchestrating IoT-driven patient health monitoring in the context of an infectious disease epidemic, clinical patient management, infectious disease surveillance, and epidemic risk analysis. The novelty and uniqueness of the ontology lie in building a bridge to link IoT-based individual patient monitoring and early warning based on patient risk assessment to infectious disease epidemic surveillance at the public health level. The ontology can also serve as a starting point to enable potential decision support systems, providing actionable insights to support public health organizations and practitioners in making informed decisions in a timely manner.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.014 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".