Summary
Objectives: The goal of this research is to provide an overall framework to enable modelbased
development of clinical guideline-based decision support systems (GBDSSs). The automatically
generated GBDSSs are aimed at providing guided support to the physician during the
application of guidelines and automatically storing guideline application data for
traceability purposes.
Methods: The development process of a GBDSS for a guideline is based on modeldriven development
(MDD) techniques which allow us to carry out such a process automatically, making
development more agile and saving on human resource costs. We use UML Statecharts
to represent the dynamics of guidelines and, based on this model, we use a MDD-based
tool chain to generate the guideline-dependent components of each GBDSS in an automatic
way. In particular, as for the traceability capabilities of each GBDSS, MDD techniques
are combined with database schema mappings for metadata management in order to automatically
generate the GBDSS-persistent component as one of the main contributions of this paper.
Results: The complete framework has been implemented as an Eclipse plug-in named GBDSSGenerator
which, starting from the statechart representing a guideline, allows the development
process to be carried out automatically by only selecting different menu options the
plug-in provides. We have successfully validated our overall approach by generating
the GBDSS for different types of clinical guidelines, even for laboratory guidelines.
Conclusions: The proposed framework allows the development of clinical guideline-based decision
support systems in an automatic way making this process more agile and saving on human
resource costs.
Keywords
Clinical practice guidelines - guideline application traceability - medical records
persistence - computing methodologies - modeldriven development
