Supporting clinical practice guidelines: lifecycle of guidelines for oncology within an XML-based guideline framework.

Clinical Practice Guidelines (CPGs) have become important instruments for supporting patient care. Many structure models for CPGs have been developed to explicitly gain structured CPG documents, some of them using XML. Often, however, problems arise in filling these structures with content and integrating CPG applications into an EPR/HIS The Universities of Giessen and Heidelberg have each presented an XML-based CPG structure, which are actually being merged into one. The obtained CPG structure will build our common "xCPG core model" embedded in an "XML framework", an authoring environment. This paper shows how this model used in the framework could support the entire 5-step CPG lifecycle, spanning CPG development, the integration of a CPG into an EPR/HIS, as well as maintenance. Furthermore, this paper points out how the method draws on the different information management services as a precondition for successful CPG implementation.