Efficient management of multi-version clinical guidelines

Clinical medicine and health-care developments in recent years testified a tremendous increase in the number of available guidelines, i.e., best practices encoding and standardizing care procedures for a given disease. Clinical guidelines are subject to continuous development and revision by committees of expert physicians and health authorities and, thus, multiple versions coexist as a consequence of the clinical and healthcare activities. Moreover, several alternatives are usually included in order to make the guidelines as general as possible, making them difficult to handle both in manual and automated fashions. In this work, we will introduce techniques to model and to provide efficient personalized access to very large collections of multi-version clinical guidelines, which can be stored both in textual and in executable format in an XML repository. In this way, multiple temporal perspectives, patient profile and context information can be used by an automated personalization service to efficiently build on demand a guideline version tailored to a specific use case. (C) 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.