title: The Digital electronic Guideline Library (DeGeL): a hybrid framework for representation and use of clinical guidelines.
abstract: We propose to present a poster (and potentially also a demonstration of the implemented system) summarizing the current state of our work on a hybrid, multiple-format representation of clinical guidelines that facilitates conversion of guidelines from free text to a formal representation. We describe a distributed Web-based architecture (DeGeL) and a set of tools using the hybrid representation. The tools enable performing tasks such as guideline specification, semantic markup, search, retrieval, visualization, eligibility determination, runtime application and retrospective quality assessment. The representation includes four parallel formats: Free text (one or more original sources); semistructured text (labeled by the target guideline-ontology semantic labels); semiformal text (which includes some control specification); and a formal, machine-executable representation. The specification, indexing, search, retrieval, and browsing tools are essentially independent of the ontology chosen for guideline representation, but editing the semi-formal and formal formats requires ontology-specific tools, which we have developed in the case of the Asbru guideline-specification language. The four formats support increasingly sophisticated computational tasks. The hybrid guidelines are stored in a Web-based library. All tools, such as for runtime guideline application or retrospective quality assessment, are designed to operate on all representations. We demonstrate the hybrid framework by providing examples from the semantic markup and search tools.
authors.affiliation: Medical Informatics Research Center, Department of Information Systems Engineering, Ben Gurion University, Beer Sheva, Israel. yshahar@bgumail.bgu.ac.il
authors.forename: Yuval
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Shahar
authors.forename: Ohad
authors.initials: O
authors.lastname: Young
authors.forename: Erez
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Shalom
authors.forename: Alon
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Mayaffit
authors.forename: Robert
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Moskovitch
authors.forename: Alon
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Hessing
authors.forename: Maya
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Galperin
mesh_terms: D001185:Artificial Intelligence; D016247:Information Storage and Retrieval; D020407:Internet; D046609:Libraries, Digital; D017410:Practice Guidelines as Topic; D011381:Programming Languages; D014584:User-Computer Interface