Conversion of Legal Text to a Logical Rules Set from Medical Law Using the Medical Relational Model and the World Rule Model for a Medical Decision Support System

Automated formalization of legal text is a time- and effort-consuming task, but human-based validation consumes even more of both. The exchange of healthcare data in compliance with the medical privacy law requires experts with deep familiarity of its intricate provisions for verification. The article presents a medical relational model (MRM) for the extraction of logical rules from medical law, required to design a medical decision support system (MDSS) that facilitates the process of exchanging data electronically with minimum human intervention. The division of medical law into small concept classes makes it easier to formalize the legal text of medical law into logical rules. These logical rules are then used to make a precise decision in compliance with the law, after evaluating requests from different entities for different purposes in MDSS. Our methodology is to analyze the legal text and release records in compliance with the medical law. For developing countries where medical laws are not as mature as HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) in the USA, the proposed methodology can be adapted to build their MDSS based on MRM.