title: A modular approach for representing and executing clinical guidelines.
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.
authors.affiliation: DISTA, University del Piemonte Orientale Amedeo Avogadro, C.so Borsalino 54, 15100, Alessandria, Italy. terenz@di.unito.it
authors.forename: P
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Terenziani
authors.forename: G
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Molino
authors.forename: M
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Torchio
mesh_terms: D001185:Artificial Intelligence; D006801:Humans; D017410:Practice Guidelines as Topic; D013997:Time Factors