Reference: Shahar, Y.; Miksch, S.; & Johnson, P. An Intention-Based Language for Sharing Clinical Guidelines. Knowledge Systems Laboratory, Medical Computer Science, March, 1996.
Abstract: Automated support for guideline-based care would be enhanced considerably by a formal, sharable representation of clinical guidelines. The representation should include the explicit intentions of the guideline's author regarding both the desirable actions of the care provider and the patient states to be achieved before, during, and after the administration of the guideline. Intentions can be represented as temporal patterns of provider actions or patient states to be maintained, achieved, or avoided. Automated support can be viewed as a collaborative effort of the health-care provider and an automated assistant and involves several different tasks. We developed a standardized, sharable, text-based, machine-readable language to represent and annotate clinical guidelines. The language supports maintenance of the automated assistant's knowledge base and should improve the quality and flexibility of the automated assistant's recommendations. We are developing reasoning mechanisms that use the language for various execution and critiquing tasks in conjunction with an online electronic medical record.
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