A quality and safety framework for point-of-care clinical guidelines.

The electronic dissemination of medical knowledge in the form of executable clinical guidelines and decision support systems must be accompanied by comprehensive methods for ensuring the quality of their knowledge content and their safety in use. This paper outlines a set of quality and safety requirements, and reviews three current guideline technologies, the Arden Syntax, GLIF and PROforma, against these requirements. The approaches used in these technologies have different strengths, and we propose a general framework for ensuring quality and safety that combines them. This framework brings together the normal documentation standards of medical publishing, rigorous design methods from software engineering, and active safety management techniques from artificial intelligence.