Towards computerizing intensive care sedation guidelines: design of a rule-based architecture for automated execution of clinical guidelines

Femke Ongenae, Femke De Backere, Kristof Steurbaut, Kirsten Colpaert, Wannes Kerckhove, Johan Decruyenaere, Filip De Turck

Computerized ICUs rely on software services to convey the medical condition of their patients as well as assisting the staff in taking treatment decisions. Such services are useful for following clinical guidelines quickly and accurately. However, the development of services is often time-consuming and error-prone. Consequently, many care-related activities are still conducted based on manually constructed guidelines. These are often ambiguous, which leads to unnecessary variations in treatments and costs.The goal of this paper is to present a semi-automatic verification and translation framework capable of turning manually constructed diagrams into ready-to-use programs. This framework combines the strengths of the manual and service-oriented approaches while decreasing their disadvantages. The aim is to close the gap in communication between the IT and the medical domain. This leads to a less time-consuming and error-prone development phase and a shorter clinical evaluation phase.