Formal semantics of guarded task structures for clinical practice guidelines
Posted by Callier Library on October 13, 2008
from Informatics for Health and Social Care
In many of the clinical practice guidelines, the process of delivering health care is only implicitly or vaguely defined. An explicit model of the medical tasks involved in this process is needed before active clinical decision support for the patient encounter can be provided. We propose task diagrams as a structured, but semi-formal intermediate step in the process of enacting a clinical practice guideline. This allows for the application-independent representation of the content of a guideline enabled for clinical decision support. Developed as a semi-formal modelling language, task diagrams require a precise semantics. We define a formal counterpart of task diagrams named guarded task structures and provide a formal semantics for what it means to act according to such a structure.
