GLM-CDS: A standards-based verifiable guideline model for decision support in clinical applications

In the last years, many parties have been engaged in developing models for encoding clinical practice guidelines in a computer-interpretable form. Despite the attempts involved to specify and adopt a single, common model, to date, there is no de facto standard solution. Moreover, the effort in defining new models has not been coupled by a parallel effort in supporting a seamless integration with the clinical workflow and existing health information systems. In such a direction, this paper proposes a standards-based verifiable guideline model, named GLM-CDS (GuideLine Model for Clinical Decision Support), whose main features can be summarized in the following points: i) its control-flow model is a formal Task-Network Model devised to represent guidelines on multiple levels of abstraction by focusing only on issues pertaining the clinical decision support; ii) its information model is expressly built on the top of the simplified patient information model standardized as HL7 Virtual Medical Record for Clinical Decision Support; iii) its terminological model is essentially constructed on the top of standard medical terminologies; iv) its computer-interpretable encoding is built in terms of both a formal, semantically well-defined and verifiable ontology for describing control-flow and information models, and a logical rule formalism for specifying decision criteria. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2013.