A framework for automated conflict detection and resolution in medical guidelines
Abstract
Common chronic conditions are routinely treated following standardised procedures known as clinical guidelines. For patients suffering from two or more chronic conditions, known as multimorbidity, several guidelines have to be applied simultaneously, which may lead to severe adverse effects when the combined recommendations and prescribed medications are inconsistent or incomplete. This paper presents an automated formal framework to detect, highlight and resolve conflicts in the treatments used for patients with multimorbidities focusing on medications. The presented extended framework has a front-end which takes guidelines captured in a standard modelling language and returns the visualisation of the detected conflicts as well as suggested alternative treatments. Internally, the guidelines are transformed into formal models capturing the possible unfoldings of the guidelines. The back-end takes the formal models associated with multiple guidelines and checks their correctness with a theorem prover, and inherent inconsistencies with a constraint solver. Key to our approach is the use of an optimising constraint solver which enables us to search for the best solution that resolves/minimises conflicts according to medication efficacy and the degree of severity in case of harmful combinations, also taking into account their temporal overlapping. The approach is illustrated throughout with a real medical example.
Citation
Bowles , J , Caminati , M B , Cha , S & Mendoza , J 2019 , ' A framework for automated conflict detection and resolution in medical guidelines ' , Science of Computer Programming , vol. 182 , pp. 42-63 . https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scico.2019.07.002
Publication
Science of Computer Programming
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
0167-6423Type
Journal article
Rights
Copyright © 2020 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CCBY license.
Description
This research is supported by the MRC-funded UK Research and Innovation grant MR/S003819/1 and by EPSRC grant EP/M014290/1.Collections
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