title: Toward a standard for guideline representation: an ontological approach.
abstract: Guidelines for clinical practice are being introduced in an extensive way in more and more different fields of medicine They have the potentialities of improving the quality and cost-efficiency of care in an increasingly complex health care delivery environment. Computerization may increase the effectiveness of both the information retrieval of guidelines and the management of guideline-based care. The scenario is evolving from stand-alone workstations to telematics applications that enable guidelines development and dissemination. However, such a knowledge sharing requires the definition of formal models for guidelines representation. The models should have a clear semantics in order to avoid ambiguities. The role of ontologies is that of making explicit the conceptualizations behind a model. In this paper we present our library of ontologies and point out its role for integrating existing guideline models and defining standard representations.
authors.affiliation: Istituto di Tecnologie Biomediche-CNR, Roma, Italy.
authors.forename: D M
authors.initials: DM
authors.lastname: Pisanelli
authors.forename: A
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Gangemi
authors.forename: G
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Steve
mesh_terms: D006801:Humans; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D017410:Practice Guidelines as Topic / Q000592:standards*; D011381:Programming Languages; D009626:Terminology as Topic; D018875:Vocabulary, Controlled