title: A UML approach to process modelling of clinical practice guidelines for enactment.
abstract: Although clinical practice guidelines (CPGs) have been suggested as a means of encapsulating best practice in evidence-based medical treatment, their usage in clinical environments has been disappointing. Criticisms of guideline representations have been that they are predominantly narrative and are difficult to incorporate into clinical information systems. This paper analyses the use of UML process modelling techniques for guideline representation and proposes the automated generation of executable guidelines using XMI. This hybrid UML-XMI approach provides flexible authoring of guideline decision and control structures whilst integrating appropriate data flow. It also uses an open XMI standard interface to allow the use of authoring tools and process control systems from multiple vendors. The paper first surveys CPG modelling formalisms followed by a brief introduction to process modelling in UMI. Furthermore, the modelling of CPGs in UML is presented leading to a case study of encoding a diabetes mellitus CPG using UML.
authors.affiliation: Department of Computer Science, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland. thomas.knape@cs.tcd.ie
authors.forename: T
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Knape
authors.forename: L
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Hederman
authors.forename: V P
authors.initials: VP
authors.lastname: Wade
authors.forename: M
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Gargan
authors.forename: C
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Harris
authors.forename: Y
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Rahman
mesh_terms: D020000:Decision Support Systems, Clinical; D003920:Diabetes Mellitus / Q000175:diagnosis / Q000628:therapy; D019317:Evidence-Based Medicine; D006801:Humans; D007494:Ireland; D019982:Organizational Case Studies; D017410:Practice Guidelines as Topic; D017064:Process Assessment, Health Care / Q000379:methods*; D012984:Software; D012985:Software Design; D017432:Unified Medical Language System