Interactive verification of medical guidelines

Abstract

In the medical domain, there is a tendency to standardize health care by providing medical guidelines as summary of the best evidence concerning a particular topic. Based on the assumption that guidelines are similar to software, we try to carry over techniques from software engineering to guideline development. In this paper, we show how to apply formal methods, namely interactive verification to improve the quality of guidelines. As an example, we have worked on a guide-line from the American Academy of Pediatrics for the management of jaundice in newborns. Contributions of this paper are as follows: (I) a formalized model of a nontrivial example guideline, (II) an approach to verify properties of medical guidelines interactively, and (III) verification of a first example property. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.