Wewebifying the computerized execution of clinical practice guidelines

Abstract

The means through which Clinical Practice Guidelines are disseminated and become accessible are a crucial factor in their later adoption by health care professionals. Making these guidelines available in Clinical Decision Support Systems renders their application more personal and thus acceptable at the moment of care. Web technologies may play an important role in increasing the reach and dissemination of guidelines, but this promise remains largely unfulfilled. There is a need for a guideline computer model that can accommodate a wide variety of medical knowledge along with a platform for its execution that can be easily used in mobile devices. This work presents the CompGuide framework, a web-based and service-oriented platform for the execution of Computer-Interpretable Guidelines. Its architecture comprises different modules whose interaction enables the interpretation of clinical tasks and the verification of clinical constraints and temporal restrictions of guidelines represented in OWL. It allows remote guideline execution with data centralization, more suitable for a work environment where physicians are mobile and not bound to a machine. The solution presented in this paper encompasses a computerinterpretable guideline model, a web-based framework for guideline execution and an Application Programming Interface for the development of other guideline execution systems.