Computer-interpretable guidelines

Computer-Interpretable Guidelines

Clinical practice guidelines aim to promote best medical practices through the reduction of medical errors and practice variation. Guidelines with a national scope concerning important medical issues or disease domains represent the highest form of practice policies. In traditional form, guidelines have been narrative / textual in composition, and have typically been created under the control of medical specialty organizations. Narrative guidelines are time- and resource-intensive in their creation and maintenance, and are limited in value by failing to provide specific recommendations in a given clinical scenario.(1) On the other hand, computer-interpretable guidelines (CIGs) can produce personalized recommendations during patient encounters, which render them more likely to affect provider behavior than standard narrative guidelines.(2)

The process of formally representing knowledge in CIGs is required to render the information computable.(3) Formal representation removes ambiguities that are present in the 'relaxed language' of narrative guidelines, and clearly identify areas for which information is lacking or missing.(4)

1. Emberton M. Clinical practice guidelines for the surgeon-how should they be understood and applied? BJU International 2001; 88(6):485-492. 2. Peleg M., Patel V.L., Tu S. et al. Support for guideline development through error classification and constraint checking. Proc AMIA Symp 2002:607-611. 3. Kaiser K., Akkaya C., and Miksch S. How can information extraction ease formalizing treatment processes in clinical practice guidelines? A method and its execution. Artifical Intelligence in Medicine 2007; 39:151-163. 4. Peleg M.(2007) Guidelines and Workflow Models. In R.A. Greenes (Ed.), Clinical Decision Support - The Road Ahead (p 283-285). Boston, MA: Elsevier.

• • Still being created**