Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Formative Research
Date Submitted: Feb 17, 2021
Date Accepted: Mar 17, 2022
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
A system for the context-specific visualization of clinical practice guidelines: Concept and Implementation
ABSTRACT
Background:
Clinical Decision Support Systems (CDSSs) often adopt and operationalize existing Clinical Practice Guidelines (CPGs) leading to higher guideline availability, increased guideline adherence, and data integration. Most of these systems use an internal state-based model of a clinical practice guideline to derive recommendations, but do not provide the user with comprehensive insight into the model.
Objective:
We present a novel approach based on dynamic guideline visualization that incorporates the individual patient's current treatment context.
Methods:
We derived multiple requirements to be fulfilled by such an enhanced guideline visualization. Using BPMN as the representation format for computer-interpretable guidelines (CIGs), a combination of graph-based representation and logical inferences is adopted for guideline processing. A context-specific guideline representation is inferred using a business rules engine.
Results:
We implemented and piloted an algorithmic approach for guideline interpretation and processing. As a result of this interpretation, a context-specific guideline is derived and visualized. Our implementation can be used as a software library, but also provides a REST-interface. Spring, Camunda and Drools served as the main frameworks for implementation.
Conclusions:
The novel guideline processing and visualization concept proved to be technically feasible. The approach addresses known problems of CIG-based CDSS. Further research is necessary to evaluate the applicability of the approach in specific medical use cases.
Citation
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Copyright
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