An interpretable guideline model to handle incomplete information

Abstract

Healthcare institutions are both natural and emotionalstressful environments; indeed, the healthcare professionals may fall intopractices that may lead to medical errors, undesirable variations in clinical doing and defensive medicine. On the other hand, Clinical Guidelines may offer an effective response to these irregularities in clinical practice, if the issues concerning their availability during the clinical process are solved. Hence, in this work it is proposed a model intended to provide a formal representation of Computer-Interpretable Guidelines, in terms of the extensions of the predicates that make their universe of discourse, as well as a Decision Support System framework to handle Incomplete Information. It will be used an extension to the language of Logic Programming, where an assessment of the Quality-of-Information of the extensions of the predicates referred to above is paramount. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.