Thesis
The hospital ontology
Explains how Pensieve models the hospital, its people and its patients as one connected ontology that every tool reads and writes through.
Pensieve models the hospital, its people and its patients as one connected ontology that every tool reads and writes through. This page sets out that model and why it holds the platform together.
One connected model
An ontology is a working digital model of real things and the relationships between them. Pensieve's ontology is the hospital itself: the people who work in it, the places that make it up, the patients it treats, and the care it gives them.
The model is one connected whole rather than a set of separate lists. A person holds a role at a site. A patient has an encounter at a site. An order belongs to an encounter. These relationships are part of the model, so a question that crosses them resolves against one representation.
What it holds
The ontology has two sides that meet in the middle. One side is the hospital as a standing structure. The other is the care that moves through it.
| Side of the model | What it holds |
|---|---|
| The hospital | Organisations, sites, units, locations, beds, services, physical assets, people and roles. |
| The care | Patients, encounters, orders, results, charges, consent and documents. |
One change everywhere
Because every tool reads the same model, one change to it lands everywhere at once. A bed moves to another unit, a role gains an action, a service opens on a new site, and each tool sees the change the moment it is made.
Access, billing, orders and the record all resolve against this one model. A permission decision reads the same people and relationships that a roster reads. A charge reads the same service that an order reads. The model is the common ground they stand on.
Tuned to the hospital
The ontology models the hospital directly, so a bed, a service, a role or an encounter means exactly what a hospital means by it. The words in the model match the words on the ward and at the counter, which keeps the distance between the software and the work short.
This focus is the point. The ontology holds the hospital domain in depth, and every tool gains that depth by reading from it.
Built on directly
Durin composes new tools directly on the ontology. A hospital arranges building blocks over the same governed model the other tools use, so a tool it builds reads the people, patients and care already in the ontology. Each such tool inherits the platform's access rules, so it shows a person the records they are already entitled to see.
Read how the tools fit together on top of this one model.