Toward Probabilistic Analysis of Guidelines

In the formal analysis of health-care, there is little work that combines probabilistic and temporal reasoning. On the one hand, there are those that aim to support the clinical thinking process, which is characterised by trade-off decision making taking into account uncertainty and preferences, i.e., the process has a probabilistic and decision-theoretic flavour. On the other hand, the management of care, e.g., guidelines and planning of tasks, is typically modelled symbolically using temporal, non-probabilistic, methods. This paper proposes a new framework for combining temporal reasoning with probabilistic decision making. The framework is instantiated with a guideline modelling language combined with probabilistic pharmokinetics and applied to the treatment of diabetes mellitus type 2.