Analyzing interactions on combining multiple clinical guidelines

Abstract

Accounting for patients with multiple health conditions is a complex task that requires analysing potential interactions among recommendations meant to address each condition. Although some approaches have been proposed to address this issue, important features still require more investigation, such as (re)usability and scalability. To this end, this paper presents an approach that relies on reusable rules for detecting interactions among recommendations coming from various guidelines. It extends a previously proposed knowledge representation model (TMR) to enhance the detection of interactions and it provides a systematic analysis of relevant interactions in the context of multimorbidity. The approach is evaluated in a case study on rehabilitation of breast cancer patients, developed in collaboration with experts. The results are considered promising to support the experts in this task.

Keywords: Clinical knowledge representation; Combining clinical guidelines; Comorbidity; Interactions among guidelines; Multimorbidity.