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Facilitating knowledge maintenance of clinical guidelines and protocols.
Peter Votruba1, Silvia Miksch, Robert Kosara
1Vienna University of Technology, Institute of Software Technology and Interactive Systems, Favoritenstrasse 9-11/188, A-1040 Vienna, Austria.
Studies in Health Technology and Informatics
|September 14, 2004
Summary
The Guideline Markup Tool (GMT) simplifies converting text-based clinical guidelines into formal XML representations. This method streamlines guideline authoring and maintenance, improving disease management software development.
Area of Science:
- Medical Informatics
- Software Engineering
Background:
- Clinical protocols and guidelines are crucial for disease management.
- Developing software for guideline execution faces a bottleneck in formalizing text-based guidelines.
Purpose of the Study:
- To introduce a method and tool to overcome the bottleneck in clinical guideline formalization.
- To facilitate the translation of text-based guidelines into a formal, machine-readable representation.
Main Methods:
- Development of the Guideline Markup Tool (GMT) for translating guidelines into XML.
- Implementation of design patterns as macros within GMT for efficient guideline editing.
- Utilizing GMT to edit Asbru protocols.
Main Results:
- GMT successfully translates clinical guidelines into a formal XML representation.
- The tool enables linking original guidelines with their formal counterparts.
- Usability study demonstrated GMT and Asbru macros are appropriate for authoring and maintaining clinical guidelines.
Conclusions:
- The Guideline Markup Tool (GMT) effectively addresses the challenge of formalizing clinical guidelines.
- The proposed approach significantly aids in the authoring and maintenance of clinical guidelines.
- GMT enhances the development process for guideline-based medical software.