Dimension of Time in Illness: An Objective View

It is almost impossible to try to represent and analyze clinical data in the absence of a temporal dimension. The temporal aspect is especially important when automated decision support is used for patient care over substantial periods. This paper emphasizes the crucial role that tasks of temporal reasoning and temporal maintenance play in modern medical information and decision support sys-tems; it also discusses the implications of providing auto-mated support to clinicians who must perform such tasks as part of broader clinical tasks (for example, monitoring and therapy). Temporal reasoning tasks mainly involve intelligent analysis of time-oriented clinical data, and tem-poral maintenance tasks focus on effective storage and retrieval of these data. Both types of tasks, however, are highly relevant for such applications as patient monitor