A modular approach for representing and executing clinical guidelines

  • Authors:

  • Paolo Terenziani;Gianpaolo Molino;Mauro Torchio

  • Affiliations:

  • DISTA, University del Piemonte Orientale Amedeo Avogadro, C.so Borsalino 54, 15100 Alessandria, Italy;Laboratorio di Informatica Clinica, Azienda Ospedaliera S. Giovanni Battista, Corso Bramante 88, 10126 Torino, Italy;Laboratorio di Informatica Clinica, Azienda Ospedaliera S. Giovanni Battista, Corso Bramante 88, 10126 Torino, Italy

  • Venue:
  • Artificial Intelligence in Medicine
  • Year:
  • 2001

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Abstract

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.