Agent-Based Management of Clinical Guidelines

Clinical Guidelines (CGs) contain a set of directions
or principles to assist the health care practitioner
with patient care decisions about appropriate
diagnostic, therapeutic, or other clinical procedures
for specific clinical circumstances. Guideline-based
systems can constitute part of a knowledge-based
decision support system in order to deliver the right knowledge to the right people in the right
form at the right time . The automation of the
guideline execution process is a basic step towards
its widespread use in medical centres.
This work focuses on the execution of CGs and
proposes the implementation of an agent-based
platform in which the actors involved in health care
coordinate their activities to perform the complex
task of guideline enactment.
The management of medical and organizational
knowledge and the formal representation of the CGs,
are two knowledge-related topics addressed in this
work and tackled through the design of several
application ontologies.
In parallel with the execution of CGs, the system
handles citizen's preferences and uses them to
implement patient-centred services.

Autorentext

David Isern Alarcón received his PhD in Computer Science from theTechnical University of Catalonia. He is member of theIntelligent Technologies for Advanced Knowledge AcquisitionResearch Group at the University Rovira i Virgili (Catalonia,Spain). His research interests include Intelligent Agents,Knowledge Management and the Semantic Web.

Klappentext

Clinical Guidelines (CGs) contain a set of directionsor principles to assist the health care practitionerwith patient care decisions about appropriatediagnostic, therapeutic, or other clinical proceduresfor specific clinical circumstances. Guideline-basedsystems can constitute part of a knowledge-baseddecision support system in order to deliver the"right knowledge to the right people in the rightform at the right time". The automation of theguideline execution process is a basic step towardsits widespread use in medical centres.This work focuses on the execution of CGs andproposes the implementation of an agent-basedplatform in which the actors involved in health carecoordinate their activities to perform the complextask of guideline enactment.The management of medical and organizationalknowledge and the formal representation of the CGs,are two knowledge-related topics addressed in thiswork and tackled through the design of severalapplication ontologies. In parallel with the execution of CGs, the systemhandles citizen's preferences and uses them toimplement patient-centred services.