Formalizing clinical practice guideline for clinical decision support systems

Clinical practice guidelines are valuable sources of clinical knowledge for healthcare professionals. However, the passive dissemination of clinical practice guidelines like publishing in medical journals is ineffective in changing clinical practice behaviour. In this work, we proposed a framework to help adopting an active clinical practice guideline dissemination approach by automatically extracting clinical knowledge from clinical practice guidelines into a clinical decision support system–friendly format. The proposed framework is intended to help human modellers by automating some of the manual formalization activities in order to minimize their manual effort. We evaluated our framework using all recommendations from two clinical practice guidelines produced by the Scottish Intercollegiate Guidelines Network: the ‘Management of lung cancer’ clinical practice guideline and the ‘Management of chronic pain’ clinical practice guideline. We conclude that the proposed framework can be effectively used to formalize drug and procedure recommendation in clinical contexts.