Conformance checking of executed clinical guidelines in presence of basic medical knowledge

Abstract

Clinical Guidelines (CGs) capture medical evidence, but are not meant to deal with single patients' peculiarities and specific context limitations and/or constraints. In practice, the physician has to exploit basic medical knowledge (BMK) in order to adapt the general CG to the specific case at hand. The interplay between CG knowledge and BMK can be very complex. In this paper, we explore such interaction from the viewpoint of the conformance problem, intended as the adherence of an observed CG execution trace to both types of knowledge. We propose an approach based on the GLARE language to represent CGs, and on an homogeneous formalization of both CGs and BMK using Event Calculus (EC) and its Prolog-based implementation , focusing on "a posteriori" conformance evaluation. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.