Representation of clinical practice guideline components in OWL

Abstract

The main purpose to attain with the advent of clinical decision sup-port systems is either to improve the quality of patient care or to reduce the oc-currence of clinical malpractice, such as medical errors and defensive medicine. It is therefore necessary a machine-readable support to integrate the recommen-dations of Clinical Practice Guidelines in such systems. CompGuide is a Com-puter-Interpretable Guideline model developed under Ontology Web Language that offers support for administrative information concerning a guideline, work-flow procedures, and the definition of clinical and temporal constraints. When compared to other models of the same type, besides having a comprehensive task network model, it introduces new temporal representations and the possi-bility of reusing pre-existing knowledge and integrating it in a guideline.