A Graphical Framework for Specification of Clinical Guidelines at Multiple Representation Levels

Formalization of a clinical guideline for purposes of automated application and quality assessment mainly involves conversion of its free-text representation into a machine comprehensible representation, i.e., a formal language, thus enabling auto-mated support. The main issues involved in this process are related to the collaboration between the expert physician and the knowledge engineer. We introduce GESHER - a graphical framework for specification of clinical guidelines at multiple representation levels. The GESHER architecture facilitates incremental specification through a set of views adapted to each representation level, enabling this process to proceed smoothly and in a transparent fashion, fostering extensive collaboration among the various types of users. The GESHER framework supports specification of guidelines at multiple representation levels, in more than one specification language, and uses the DeGeL digital guideline library architecture as its knowledge base. The GESHER architecture also uses a temporal abstraction knowledge base to store its declarative knowledge, and a standard medical-vocabularies server for generic specification of key terms, thus enabling reuse of the specification at multiple sites.