MobiGuide

Communications of the ACM 

The trend for an aging population, which is typical for Europe and for other high-income regions, brings with it a sharp increase in the number of chronic patients and a shortage of clinicians and hospital beds. Evidence-based clinical decision-support systems are one of the promising solutions for this problem.15 In the 1990s, different research groups started to develop computer-interpretable clinical guidelines (CIGs)7 as a form of evidence-based decision-support systems (DSS). Narrative evidence-based clinical guidelines, focused on a single disease, and containing recommendations for the disease diagnosis and management, were manually represented in CIG formalisms, such as Asbru,11 GLIF,1 or PROforma.3 The CIGs formed a network of clinical decisions and actions and served as a knowledge base.