Filling the Gap Between Guideline Development and Formalization Process - A Requirement Analysis

Clinical guidelines are made to aid diagnosis, management and treatment of patients. Authoring, publishing, updating and maintaining clinical guidelines are time-consuming, labour-intensive and complex. Unfortunately, it is time-consuming to search and retrieve patient-specific recommendations in free-text documents. Literature is rich with methods proposed to support encoding of clinical guidelines into computer-interpretable formats (CIG). However, there is a lack of studies covering the actual guideline development and authoring. So, the objective of this research is to explore gap between tools and methods for authoring guideline content and for designing and implementing computer-interpretable guidelines. Towards this objective, we have performed a user requirements analysis to arrive at a set of design recommendations. The resulting functionality framework can be used to design and develop authoring tools for the entire life-cycle of the computerized clinical guideline.