Abstract
In this paper, we propose a formal theory to describe the development of medical guideline text in detail, but at a sufficiently high level abstraction, in such way that essential elements of the guidelines are highlighted. We argue that because of the fragmentary nature of medical guidelines, an approach where details in guideline text are omitted is justified. The different aspects of a guideline are illustrated and discussed by a number of examples from the Dutch breast cancer guideline. Furthermore, we discuss how the theory can be used to detect flaws in the guideline text at an early stage in the guideline development process and consequently can be used to improve the quality of medical guidelines.
This work has been partially supported by the European Commission’s IST program, under contract number IST-FP6-508794 Protocure II.
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© 2005 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Hommersom, A., Lucas, P., van Bommel, P., van der Weide, T. (2005). A History-Based Algebra for Quality-Checking Medical Guidelines. In: Miksch, S., Hunter, J., Keravnou, E.T. (eds) Artificial Intelligence in Medicine. AIME 2005. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 3581. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11527770_24
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11527770_24
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
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