A hybrid approach to clinical guideline and to basic medical knowledge conformance

Abstract

Several computer-based approaches to Clinical Guidelines have been developed in the last two decades. However, only recently the community has started to cope with the fact that Clinical Guidelines are just a part of the medical knowledge that physicians have to take into account when treating patients. The procedural knowledge in the guidelines have to be complemented by additional declarative medical knowledge. In this paper, we analyse such an interaction, by studying the conformance problem, defined as evaluating the adherence of a set of performed clinical actions w.r.t. the behaviour recommended by the guideline and by the medical knowledge. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.