Executing clinical guidelines: temporal issues.

ABSTRACT

In our previous work, we proposed a domain-independent language to describe clinical guidelines and a graphical tool to acquire them. In this paper, we describe an approach to execute clinical guidelines. We propose a flexible execution engine that can be used in clinical decision support applications, and also for medical education, or for integrating guidelines into the clinical workflow. We also focus our attention on temporal issues in the execution of guidelines, including the treatment of composite, concurrent and/or cyclic actions.