A modular approach for representing and executing clinical guidelines

• Published in: Artificial intelligence in medicine Vol. 23; no. 3; pp. 249 - 276
• Main Authors: Terenziani, Paolo, Molino, Gianpaolo, Torchio, Mauro
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Netherlands Elsevier B.V 01.11.2001
• Subjects: Acquisition; Artificial Intelligence; Clinical guidelines; Consistency checking; Execution; Humans; Practice Guidelines as Topic; Representation; Temporal issues; Time Factors; Clinical guidelines; Representation; Execution; Temporal issues; Acquisition; Consistency checking
• ISSN: 0933-3657; 1873-2860
• DOI: 10.1016/S0933-3657(01)00087-2

In this paper, we propose an approach for managing clinical guidelines. We outline a modular architecture, allowing us to separate two conceptually distinct aspects: the representation (and acquisition) of clinical guidelines and their execution. We propose an expressive formalism, which allows one to deal with the context-dependent character of clinical guidelines and also takes into account different temporal aspects. We also describe our tool for acquiring clinical guidelines, which provides a user-friendly interface to physicians, and automatically detects many forms of syntactic and semantic inconsistencies in the guidelines being acquired. In the second part of the paper, we describe a flexible engine for executing clinical guidelines (e.g. for clinical decision support applications, for medical education, or for integrating guidelines into the clinical practice), focusing our attention on temporal issues.