PathGuide - model-based generation of guideline-compliant pathways for the use in different hospital information systems.

Clinical guidelines and clinical pathways are accepted instruments for quality assurance and process optimization. Defining a standardized patient treatment for a specific disease clinical guidelines provide evident medical knowledge for diagnostic and therapeutic issues in form of narrative recommendations. Clinical pathways offer process-like descriptions defining daily diagnostic and treatment procedures. The use of evident knowledge (in form of clinical guidelines) during pathway development is highly recommended. But the transfer of unstructured recommendations to care processes (clinical pathways) is not straightforward. This article proposes a model-based approach to support the development of guideline-compliant pathways and focuses their deployment into different target systems. Especially HIS (hospital information system) are considered as this is the critical system for managing patient care processes in the hospital. So the results of latest research provided by clinical guidelines are implemented into daily practice and therefore improve patient care.