Abstract
Medical guidelines can significantly improve quality of medical care and reduce costs. But how do we get sound and well-structured guidelines? This paper investigates the use of quality indicators that are formulated by medical institutions to evaluate medical care. The main research questions are (i) whether it is possible to formalise those indicators in a specific knowledge representation language for medical guidelines, and (ii) whether it is possible to verify whether such guidelines do indeed satisfy these indicators. In a case study on two real-life guidelines (Diabetes and Jaundice) we have studied 35 indicators, that were developped independently from these guidelines. Of these 25 (71%!) suggested anomalies in one of the guidelines in our case study.
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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van Gendt, M., ten Teije, A., Serban, R., van Harmelen, F. (2005). Formalising Medical Quality Indicators to Improve 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_29
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11527770_29
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