Toward a standard for guideline representation: an ontological approach

• Published in: Proceedings - AMIA Symposium pp. 906 - 910
• Main Authors: Pisanelli, D M, Gangemi, A, Steve, G
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States American Medical Informatics Association 1999
• Subjects: Humans; Models, Theoretical; Practice Guidelines as Topic - standards; Programming Languages; Terminology as Topic; Vocabulary, Controlled
• ISSN: 1531-605X

Guidelines for clinical practice are being introduced in an extensive way in more and more different fields of medicine They have the potentialities of improving the quality and cost-efficiency of care in an increasingly complex health care delivery environment. Computerization may increase the effectiveness of both the information retrieval of guidelines and the management of guideline-based care. The scenario is evolving from stand-alone workstations to telematics applications that enable guidelines development and dissemination. However, such a knowledge sharing requires the definition of formal models for guidelines representation. The models should have a clear semantics in order to avoid ambiguities. The role of ontologies is that of making explicit the conceptualizations behind a model. In this paper we present our library of ontologies and point out its role for integrating existing guideline models and defining standard representations.