Engineering of a clinical decision support framework for the point of care use

Computerized decision support for use at the point of care has to be comprehensive. It means that clinical information stored in electronic health records needs to be integrated with various forms of clinical knowledge (elicited from experts, discovered from data or summarized in systematic reviews of clinical trials). In order to provide such comprehensive support we created the MET-A3Support framework for constructing clinical applications aimed at various medical conditions. We employed the multiagent system paradigm and the O-MaSE methodology to define an engineering process involving three main activities: requirements engineering, analysis and design. Then we applied the process to build MET-A3Support. The paper describes the engineering process and its results, including models representing selected elements of our framework.