Efficient management of multi-version clinical guidelines

Clinical medicine and health-care developments in recent years testified a tremendous increase in the
number of available guidelines, i.e., ‘‘best practices’’ encoding and standardizing care procedures for a
given disease. Clinical guidelines are subject to continuous development and revision by committees
of expert physicians and health authorities and, thus, multiple versions coexist as a consequence of
the clinical and healthcare activities. Moreover, several alternatives are usually included in order to make
the guidelines as general as possible, making them difficult to handle both in manual and automated
fashions. In this work, we will introduce techniques to model and to provide efficient personalized access
to very large collections of multi-version clinical guidelines, which can be stored both in textual and in
executable format in an XML repository. In this way, multiple temporal perspectives, patient profile
and context information can be used by an automated personalization service to efficiently build on
demand a guideline version tailored to a specific use case.