OpenEHR-based representation of guideline compliance data through the example of stroke clinical practice guidelines

In light of the lack of integration between electronic health records and decision support, this research explores how semantic electronic health record technology, particularly openEHR, can be used to represent clinical practice guidelines (CPGs). We used the tool Visual Understanding Environment (VUE) to build a graphical representation of the European ischaemic stroke clinical management guidelines. We used openEHR archetypes to conceptually support this process and also to represent clinical concepts in stroke treatment compliance criteria. Our results show that, as an intermediate step in authoring computer-interpretable guidelines, an openEHR-based representation of CPGs and their compliance criteria supports the process of identifying the relevant knowledge and data elements in the care process to be modelled. It further eases the separation of the CPGs into data and logic components and is useful as a communication means for guideline verification by clinicians. Additionally, we retrieved existing and authored new openEHR archetypes for the acute stroke clinical management process. We conclude that openEHR-based guideline and compliance data representations may be a promising first step in building future decision support applications that are well connected to the electronic health record, can be useful in locating discrepancies between different sets of guidelines within the same care context and provide a helpful tool for driving the archetype authoring and review process.