Incremental guideline formalization with tool support

Guideline formalization is recognized as an important component in improving computerized guidelines, which in turn leads to better informedness, lower inter-practician variability and, ultimately, to higher quality healthcare. By means of a modeling exercise, we investigate the role of guideline formalization tools which use two different knowledge transformation principles in producing re-usable knowledge objects useful for representing medical processes and performing updates of medical guidelines. We give a general evaluation of usefulness and state the main requirements for tools that reuse medical knowledge and support authoring of guidelines

Incremental guideline formalization with tool support

Abstract. Guideline formalization is recognized as an important component in improving computerized guidelines, which in turn leads to better informedness, lower inter-practician variability and, ultimately, to higher quality healthcare. By means of a modeling exercise, we investigate the role of guideline formalization tools which use two different knowledge transformation principles in producing re-usable knowledge objects useful for representing medical processes and performing updates of medical guidelines. We give a general evaluation of usefulness and state the main requirements for tools that reuse medical knowledge and support authoring of guidelines.