Representation of Clinical Practice Guideline Components in OWL

The objective of clinical decision support systems is to improve the quality of care and, if possible, help to reduce the occurrence of clinical malpractice cases such as medical errors and defensive medicine. To do so they need a machine-readable support to integrate the recommendations of Clinical Practice Guidelines. CompGuide is a Computer-Interpretable Guideline model developed in Ontology Web Language that offers support for administrative information concerning a guideline, workflow procedures, and the definition of clinical and temporal constraints. When compared to other models of the same type, besides having a comprehensive task network model, it introduces new temporal representations and the possibility of reusing pre-existing knowledge and integrating it in a guideline.