A modular approach for representing and executing clinical guidelines

In this paper, we propose an approach for managing clinical guidelines. We outline a modular architecture, allowing us to separate two conceptually di stinct aspects: the representation (and acquisition) of clinical guidelines and their execution. We propose an expressive formalism, which allows one to deal with the conte xt-dependent character of clinical guidelines and also takes into account d ifferent temporal aspects. We also describe our tool for acquiring clinical guidelines, which provides a user-friendly interface to physicians, and au tomatically detects many forms of syntactic and semantic inconsistencies in the guidelines being acquired. In the second part of the paper, we describe a flexible engine for executin g clinical guidelines (e.g. for clinical decision support applications, for medical education, or for integrating guidelines into the clinical practic e), focusing our attention on temporal issues. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B. V. All rights reserved.