Environment-Driven Skeletal Plan Execution for the Medical Domain

An important application of both data abstraction and plan execution is the execution of clinical guidelines and protocols (CGP), both to validate them against a large set of test cases and to provide decision support at the point of care. CGPs can be represented and executed as a hierarchy of skeletal plans. To bridge the gap between low-level data and high-level concepts in the CGP, intelligent temporal data abstraction must be integrated with plan execution. In this paper we describe a solution to this challenge which was implemented as part of the European project Protocure II to improve the quality of CGPs. They are translated to the high-level plan representation language Asbru which again is compiled into a network of abstraction modules by the system. Then this network performs the content of the plans triggered by the arriving patient data. By this, we seamlessly integrate the synchronisation of guideline execution with observed patient state, complex temporal abstractions and execution of complex plans without requiring the user to handle the low-level details. Instead, user-friendly tools are used to create and maintain the guideline.