Computerization framework for clinical practice guidelines by extending the XML guidelines element model (GEM)

Contextually sensitive and semantically related evidence-based knowledge play an important role in decision-making. Clinical practice guidelines (CPG) are being developed to provide a rich source of up-to-date knowledge of evidence-based best clinical practices. Such knowledge assists healthcare practitioner in specific clinical circumstances at their decision-points. In many studies, it was shown that the effectiveness of CPG could be improved with their computerization. In this paper, we present our CPG-knowledge computerization framework that has been developed and implemented along the lines of knowledge management approaches. This framework adds context, semantics and related meta-information to the CPGs knowledge content using an extended-knowledge component ontology and UMLS. It also transforms them into a set of structured 'extended-knowledge components'. These extended-knowledge components constitute a 'CPG knowledge base', which is used for providing assistance at point of care.