Agent-Based Management of Clinical Guidelines: An Ontological, Personalised and Practical Approach

Clinical Guidelines (CGs) contain a set of directions or principles to assist the health care practitioner with patient care decisions about appropriate diagnostic, therapeutic, or other clinical procedures for specific clinical circumstances. Guideline-based systems can constitute part of a knowledge-based decision support system in order to deliver the ?right knowledge to the right people in the right form at the right time?. The automation of the guideline execution process is a basic step towards its widespread use in medical centres. This work focuses on the execution of CGs and proposes the implementation of an agent-based platform in which the actors involved in health care coordinate their activities to perform the complex task of guideline enactment. The management of medical and organizational knowledge and the formal representation of the CGs, are two knowledge-related topics addressed in this work and tackled through the design of several application ontologies. In parallel with the execution of CGs, the system handles citizen's preferences and uses them to implement patient-centred services.