An Ontological Approach for the Development of Shareable Guidelines

Computer-based clinical guidelines and protocols are being increasingly applied in diverse areas. Although there is still little standardization to facilitate sharing, various parties are engaged in the development of shareable guideline representation formalisms and corresponding decision support systems. This paper mentions some of these developed representations, discusses their pros en cons, and demonstrates and discusses a new approach, which combines common elements from earlier-developed formalisms with new ones to improve the reusability and shareability of developed guidelines. An ontological representation is presented that formalizes guidelines in terms of domain-specific knowledge and employed generic strategies that use this domain-specific knowledge in order to solve particular guideline tasks. Furthermore, a framework is described that supports this representation and three examples are shown of guidelines of various granularity and complexity that were developed by means of this approach.