Easing the Formalization of Clinical Guidelines with a User-tailored, Extensible Agile Model Driven Development (AMDD)

Abstract

Transforming a text-based clinical guideline in a computer-interpretable form is a time-consuming and demanding task due to the various users involved, who have different technical and medical background. In the past, different guideline representation languages and supporting tools have been developed, however, these approaches seldom address the various users' demands and needs in the different steps of the guidelines' life cycle. Our approach is oriented on the guideline life-cycle and takes the requirements and the interactions of the various actors into account to formalize guidelines in a computer-interpretable guideline representation by using a semi-automatic way based on NLP techniques. We analyzed the guideline life-cycle and the roles of the actors to build such a model. This model is prototypical implemented and showed the usefulness and utility for the various users.