The overarching goal of this research program is to enable clinical experts to transform knowledge about best practices into systems that can influence clinical care.
Our specific aims are to:
- Create a library of representative guideline recommendation statements that will be used to better understand and characterize the current corpus of guideline statements and to serve as a resource for modeling and evaluation activities;
- Delineate the range of ambiguous, vague, and underspecified recommendation statements and devise targeted remedies;
- Analyze the terminology of obligation (deontic components) used in guideline recommendation statements to understand how this concept can be applied most effectively;
- Create an ontology of recommendations by integrating an NLP-based semantic analysis of a body of exemplary guideline statements with a domain-oriented recommendation model;
- Develop and evaluate a controlled language editor with WYSIWYM interface for use by domain experts to facilitate authoring of recommendations that can be translated into decision support tools.