In order to meet the data-processing requirements for protocol-based decision support, a clinical data-management system must be capable of creating high-level summaries of time-oriented patient data and retrieving these summaries in a temporally meaningful fashion. We have previously described a temporal-abstraction module (RESUME) and a temporal-querying module (Chronus) that can be used together to perform these tasks. These modules had to be coordinated by individual applications, however, in order to resolve the temporal queries of protocol planners. In this paper, we present a new module that integrates the previous two modules and that automatically provides for their coordination. The new module can be used as a stand-alone system for retrieving both primitve and abstracted time-oriented data or can be embedded in a larger computation framework for protocol-based reasoning.
