Development of a clinical decision support system for antibiotic management in a hospital environment

The rise of infections caused by multidrug-resistant bacteria has become a very important issue for health institutions around the world, urging them to a more appropriate use of antibiotics. Clinical decision support systems have a very important role in this area. We propose the development of a clinical decision support system focused on the antibiotic stewardship program implemented in hospitals. The need for a multi-user perspective, both reactive and proactive behaviours, and the use of many heterogeneous knowledge sources are identified as the main requirements that differentiate this clinical scenario from a decision support point of view. We show that a combination of production rules, ontologies, workflow modelling and subgroup discovery techniques could be used to fulfil these requirements. Finally, we describe a platform on which these techniques will be developed and tested.