title: Toward improved guideline quality: using the COGS statement with GEM.
abstract: The Conference on Guideline Standardization (COGS) was convened to create a standardized documentation checklist for clinical practice guidelines in an effort to promote guideline quality and facilitate implementation. The statement was created by a multidisciplinary panel using a rigorous consensus development methodology. The Guideline Elements Model (GEM) provides a standardized approach to representing guideline documents using XML. In this work, we demonstrate the sufficiency of GEM for describing COGS components. Using the mapping between COGS and GEM elements we built an XSLT application to examine a guideline's adherence (or non-adherence) to the COGS checklist. Once a guideline has been marked up according to the GEM hierarchy, its knowledge content can be reused in multiple ways.
authors.affiliation: Yale Center for Medical Informatics, Yale University School of Medicine, 300 George Street, New Haven, CT 06511, USA. richard.shiffman@yale.edu
authors.forename: Richard N
authors.initials: RN
authors.lastname: Shiffman
authors.forename: Georges
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Michel
mesh_terms: D003226:Congresses as Topic; D017410:Practice Guidelines as Topic / Q000592:standards*; D011381:Programming Languages; D011785:Quality Assurance, Health Care; D012984:Software