The Role of Ontologies for an Effective and Unambiguous Dissemination of Clinical Guidelines

Guidelines for clinical practice are being introduced in an extensive way in more and more different fields of medicine They have the potential to improve the quality and cost-efficiency of care in a complex health care delivery environment. Computerization may increase the effectiveness of both the information retrieval of guidelines and the management of guideline-based care. The scenario is evolving from stand-alone workstations to telematics applications that enable guidelines development and dissemination. However, such a knowledge sharing requires the definition of formal models for guidelines representation. The models should have a clear semantics in order to avoid ambiguities. The role of ontologies is that of making explicit the conceptualizations behind a model. In this paper we present our library of generic and domain ontologies and point out its role for integrating existing guideline models and defining standard representations. In particular, we stress the distinction -often collapsed within existing guideline models- between the conceptualization of actual procedures, the conceptualization of planning, and the conceptualization behind the diagrammatic representation of plans.