Requirements of a Sharable Guideline Representation for Computer Applications

Guidelines for care are growing rapidly in significance for all health care practitioners. The greater the number and complexity of these guidelines, the greater is the need for computer applications to manage, organize and disseminate them. To avoid duplication of the effort required to specify guidelines for computer use, we need a sharable representation of guidelines. In this paper, we consider what is required to achieve such a representation. We identify features of guideline applications, consider the types of information needed by an application in order to provide each feature, and discuss what is required of a guideline representation in order to express this information. Features include explicit representation of guideline structure, a patient data model, computable eligibility criteria and decision logic, computable action specifications, vocabulary, and supplemental materials.

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