Towards an Event-Condition-Action (ECA)-Based Formalization of Clinical Guidelines

Although existing approaches, such as Arden Syntax and Asbru, support computable medical knowledge representation, formalizing clinical practice guidelines (CGs) and their individual recommendations so that the logic is clear, consistent and usable, remains challenging. We propose a pre-structuring formalism based on Event-Condition-Action (ECA) - a well-established paradigm in computer science for modeling reactive systems, demonstrate its applicability to real-world examples and map it to Arden Syntax and Asbru. Our results show that this formalism provides a semantically coherent foundation that aligns with the structure of other formal guideline representations.