A hybrid framework for representation and use of clinical guidelines

Clinical guidelines are a powerful method for improving the quality of medical care', while reducing its costs. Most clinical guidelines, however, are text-based and inaccessible to the physicians who most need them; in addition, physicians rarely have the time to decide which guideline best pertains to their patient, and what does applying that guideline to the particular patient entail. Thus, there is an urgent need to automate guideline dissemination and application. There have been multiple efforts to automate guideline-based care. However, converting free-text-based guidelines to a machine-readable format, while supporting both text-based search and retrieval, as well as automated application and quality
assessment, is a pressing problem.