Decision support, knowledge representation and management: a balancing act between clinical use and implementation of sophisticated reasoning techniques? Findings from the section on decision support, knowledge representation and management.

Objectives: To position the papers selected for the IMIA Yearbook 2007 in the context of current research in decision support, knowledge representation and management.

Method: Synopsis of the articles selected for the IMIA Yearbook 2007.

Results: In the Yearbook 2007 the best paper selection of the section Decision support, Knowledge management in Representation' shows, that the evaluation of the influence of decision support on medical behavior and outcome is as important as research on new reasoning technologies and methods.

Modeling economic aspects of hospital information systems to give decision support for strategic information management.

Information systems require strategic planning in order to adapt their functionality and quality to the needs of health care organizations. Next to effectivity, cost efficiency in supplying and operating information systems is a particular objective. Hospital information systems with their technical infrastructure, their application systems and the hereby supported business functions can be described with the help of the meta model 3LGM2 and the 3LGM2 tool.

Decision support, knowledge representation and management: A broad methodological spectrum. Findings from the Decision Support, Knowledge Representation and Management.

Objectives: To summarize current excellent research in the field of decision support, knowledge management and representation.

Methods: Synopsis of the articles selected for the IMIA Yearbook 2006.

Results: Decision Support, Knowledge Representation and Management covers a broad spectrum of methods applied to a variety of medical problems and domains.

3LGM2-modeling to support management of health information systems.

Objective: Both regional health information systems (rHIS) and hospital information systems (HIS) need systematic information management. Due to their complexity information management needs a thorough description or model of the managed information system.

Methods: The three layer graph-based meta-model (3LGM(2)) and the 3LGM(2) tool provide means for effectively describing and modeling HIS by hospital functions, application systems and physical data processing components.

Architectural quality criteria for hospital information systems.

An important part of hospital information systems (HIS) evaluation is the quality assessment of its architecture, i.e. the structure of its IT infrastructure.