ArticleBMC medical informatics and decision making2006
Evaluation of PROforma as a language for implementing medical guidelines in a practical context.
Article in BMC medical informatics and decision making, 2006. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 papers.
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Who cites it
5 citing papers in PubMed.
- Telemonitoring: use in the management of hypertension.Vascular health and risk management · 2014Review
- Requirements for guidelines systems: implementation challenges and lessons from existing software-engineering efforts.BMC medical informatics and decision making · 2012Article
- Towards computerizing intensive care sedation guidelines: design of a rule-based architecture for automated execution of clinical guidelines.BMC medical informatics and decision making · 2010Article
- Using health information technology to improve hypertension management.Current hypertension reports · 2008Review
- Review
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
backgroundPROforma is one of several languages that allow clinical guidelines to be expressed in a computer-interpretable manner. How these languages should be compared, and what requirements they should meet, are questions that are being actively addressed by a community of interested researchers.
methodsWe have developed a system to allow hypertensive patients to be monitored and assessed without visiting their GPs (except in the most urgent cases). Blood pressure measurements are performed at the patients' pharmacies and a web-based system, created using PROforma, makes recommendations for continued monitoring, and/or changes in medication. The recommendations and measurements are transmitted electronically to a practitioner with authority to issue and change prescriptions. We evaluated the use of PROforma during the knowledge acquisition, analysis, design and implementation of this system. The analysis focuses on the logical adequacy, heuristic power, notational convenience, and explanation support provided by the PROforma language.
resultsPROforma proved adequate as a language for the implementation of the clinical reasoning required by this project. However a lack of notational convenience led us to use UML activity diagrams, rather than PROforma process descriptions, to create the models that were used during the knowledge acquisition and analysis phases of the project. These UML diagrams were translated into PROforma during the implementation of the project.
conclusionThe experience accumulated during this study highlighted the importance of structure preserving design, that is to say that the models used in the design and implementation of a knowledge-based system should be structurally similar to those created during knowledge acquisition and analysis. Ideally the same language should be used for all of these models. This means that great importance has to be attached to the notational convenience of these languages, by which we mean the ease with which they can be read, written, and understood by human beings. The importance of notational convenience arises from the fact that a language used during knowledge acquisition and analysis must be intelligible to the potential users of a system, and to the domain experts who provide the knowledge that will be used in its construction.
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