title: Runtime application of Hybrid-Asbru clinical guidelines.
abstract: Clinical guidelines are a major tool in improving the quality of medical care. However, to support the automation of guideline-based care, several requirements must be filled, such as specification of the guidelines in a machine-interpretable format and a connection to an Electronic Patient Record (EPR). For several different reasons, it is beneficial to convert free-text guidelines gradually, through several intermediate representations, to a machine-interpretable format. It is also realistic to consider the case when an EPR is unavailable. We propose an innovative approach to the runtime application of intermediate-represented Hybrid-Asbru guidelines, with or without an available EPR. The new approach capitalizes on our extensive work on developing the Digital electronic Guideline Library (DeGeL) framework. The new approach was implemented as the Spock system. For evaluation, three guidelines were specified in an intermediate format and were applied to a set of simulated patient records designed to cover prototypical cases. In all cases, the Spock system produced the expected output, and did not produce an unexpected one. Thus, we have demonstrated the capability of the Spock system to apply guidelines encoded in the Hybrid-Asbru intermediate representation, when an EPR is not available.
authors.affiliation: Medical Informatics Research Center, Department of Information Systems Engineering, Ben Gurion University, Beer Sheva, Israel. ohadyn@bgu.ac.il <ohadyn@bgu.ac.il>
authors.forename: Ohad
authors.initials: O
authors.lastname: Young
authors.forename: Yuval
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Shahar
authors.forename: Yair
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Liel
authors.forename: Eitan
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Lunenfeld
authors.forename: Guy
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Bar
authors.forename: Erez
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Shalom
authors.forename: Susana B
authors.initials: SB
authors.lastname: Martins
authors.forename: Laszlo T
authors.initials: LT
authors.lastname: Vaszar
authors.forename: Tal
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Marom
authors.forename: Mary K
authors.initials: MK
authors.lastname: Goldstein
mesh_terms: D001185:Artificial Intelligence; D003199:Computer Systems; D003628:Database Management Systems; D020000:Decision Support Systems, Clinical; D016247:Information Storage and Retrieval / Q000379:methods*; D007557:Israel; D009323:Natural Language Processing; D017410:Practice Guidelines as Topic; D014584:User-Computer Interface