An ontological approach for the development of shareable guidelines

Area of Science:

• Medical Informatics
• Computer Science
• Knowledge Representation

Background:

• Computer-based clinical guidelines and protocols are widely used but lack standardization for sharing.
• Existing formalisms for guideline representation have limitations in reusability and shareability.
• Decision support systems rely on standardized and shareable guideline representations.

Purpose of the Study:

• To present a new approach for formalizing clinical guidelines to improve reusability and shareability.
• To introduce an ontological representation for clinical guidelines.
• To demonstrate a framework supporting this representation with practical examples.

Main Methods:

• Review and discussion of existing guideline representation formalisms.
• Development of a novel ontological representation combining common and new elements.
• Creation of a supporting framework for the ontological representation.
• Application of the approach to three diverse clinical guideline examples.

Main Results:

• A new ontological representation formalizes guidelines using domain-specific knowledge and generic strategies.
• The proposed framework effectively supports the ontological representation of guidelines.
• Successfully developed guidelines of varying complexity using the new approach.
• Demonstrated improved reusability and shareability of formalized clinical guidelines.

Conclusions:

• The presented ontological approach enhances the reusability and shareability of computer-based clinical guidelines.
• The developed framework provides a robust system for guideline formalization and decision support.
• This method offers a promising solution for standardizing and disseminating clinical knowledge effectively.