Supporting tools for guideline development and dissemination

This paper describes a methodology for representing clinical practice guidelines and facilitating their introduction into the medical routine. Since this methodology can be exploited in a www environment, it can represent the basis for sharing clinical guidelines both between different institutions and between human and software agents cooperating within a clinical context. In addition, the proposed guideline formalization is intended to deal with patient and organization preferences. This goal is achieved by augmenting the guideline with decision-analytic models and by linking the guideline with an organizational model of the clinical setting. The designed framework allows guideline development, tailoring and implementation, real-time access to the guideline prescriptions and guideline validation. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.