THE ASGAARD PROJECT - A TASK-SPECIFIC FRAMEWORK FOR THE APPLICATION AND CRITIQUING OF TIME-ORIENTED CLINICAL GUIDELINES

Clinical guidelines can be viewed as generic skeletal-plan schemata th at represent clinical procedural knowledge and that are instantiated a nd refined dynamically by care providers over significant time periods . In the Asgaard project, we are investigating a set of tasks that sup port the application of clinical guidelines by a care provider other t han the guideline's designer. We are focusing on the application of th e guideline, recognition of care providers' intentions from their acti ons, and critique of care providers' actions given the guideline and t he patient's medical record. We are developing methods that perform th ese tasks in multiple clinical domains, given an instance of a properl y represented clinical guideline and an electronic medical patient rec ord. In this paper, we point out the precise domain-specific knowledge required by each method, such as the explicit intentions of the guide line designer (represented as temporal patterns to be achieved or avoi ded). We present a machine-readable language, called Asbru, to represe nt and re, annotate guidelines based on the task-specific ontology. We also introduce an automated tool for the acquisition of clinical guid elines based on the same ontology, developed using the PROTEGE-II fram ework. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.