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.