A framework and tools for authoring, editing, documenting, sharing, searching, navigating, and executing...

With the spread of managed care and integrated delivery networks, an increased emphasis has been placed on the cost-effectiveness of clinical practices. The need has been recognized to use guidelines to support education, and to integrate them into clinical practice. A specification for guideline representation that would facilitate computer-based clinical guideline sharing has been developed by the InterMed Collaboratory. Called GLIF (GuideLine Interchange Format), this specification and its proposed extensions have been the basis for our implementation of a framework and suite of integrated software tools for guideline authoring and editing, packaging in XML, Internet distribution, navigation, eligibility determination, and automatic execution.