A semantically enriched clinical guideline model enabling deployment in heterogeneous healthcare environments

Clinical guidelines are developed to assist healthcare practitioners to make decisions on patient's medical problems, and as such they communicate with external applications to retrieve patient data to initiate medical actions through clinical workflows, and transmit information to alert/reminder systems. The interoperability problems in the healthcare information technology domain prevent wider deployment of clinical guidelines because each deployment requires a tedious custom adaptation phase. In this paper, we provide machine-processable mechanisms that express the semantics of clinical guideline interfaces so that automated processes can be used to access the clinical resources for guideline deployment and execution. To be able to deploy the semantically extended guidelines to healthcare settings semiautomatically, the underlying application's semantics must also be available. We describe how this can be achieved based on two prominent implementation technologies in use in the eHealth domain: integrating healthcare enterprise cross-enterprise document sharing integration profile for discovering and exchanging electronic healthcare records and Web service technology for interacting with the clinical workflows and wireless medical sensor devices. The system described in this paper is realized within the scope of the SAPHIRE Project.