Declarative and procedural approaches for modelling clinical guidelines: Addressing flexibility issues

Abstract

Recent analysis of clinical Computer-Interpretable Guideline (CIG) modelling languages from the perspective of the control-flow patterns has revealed limited capabilities of these languages to provide flexibility for encoding and executing clinical guidelines. The concept of flexibility is of major importance in the medical-care domain since no guarantee can be given on predicting the state of patients at the point of care. In this paper, we illustrate how the flexibility of CIG modelling languages can be improved by describing clinical guidelines using a declarative approach. We propose a CIGDec language for modelling and enacting clinical guidelines. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.