Adaptive guideline-based treatment workflows with AdaptFlow.

One goal in modern medicine is to increase the treatment quality. A major step towards this aim is to support the execution of standardized, guideline-based clinical protocols, which are used in many medical domains, e.g., for oncological chemotherapies. Standardized chemotherapy protocols contain detailed and structured therapy plans describing the single therapy steps (e.g., examinations or drug applications). Therefore, workflow management systems offer good support for these processes. However, the treatment of a particular patient often requires modifications due to unexpected infections, toxicities, or social factors. The modifications are described in the treatment protocol but not as part of the standard process. To be able to further execute the therapy workflows in case of exceptions running workflows have to be adapted dynamically. Furthermore, the physician should be supported by automated exception detection and decision support for derivation of necessary modifications. The AdaptFlow prototype offers the required support for the field of oncological chemotherapies by enhancing a workflow system with dynamic workflow adaptation and rule based decision support for exception detection and handling.