Ontological Modelling of a Psychiatric Clinical Practice Guideline

Abstract

Clinical practice guidelines (CPGs) serve to transfer results from evidence-based medicine into clinical practice. There is growing interest in clinical decision support systems (CDSS) implementing the guideline recommendations; research on such systems typically considers combinations of workflow languages with knowledge representation formalisms. Here, we report on experience with an OWL-based proof-of-concept implementation of parts of the German S3 guideline for schizophrenia. From the information-technological point of view, the salient feature of our implementation is that it represents the CPG entirely as a logic-based ontology, without resorting, e.g., to rule-based action formalisms or hard-wired workflows to capture clinical pathways. Our current goal is to establish that such an implementation is feasible; long-range benefits we expect from the approach are modularity of CPG implementation, ease of maintenance, and logical unity.