Supporting Multi-level User-driven Detection of Guideline Interactions

Clinical practice guidelines are widely used to support physicians, but only on individual pathologies. The treatment of patients affected by multiple diseases (comorbid patients) requires the development of new approaches, supporting physicians in the detection of interactions between guidelines. We propose a new methodology, supporting flexible and physician-driven search and detection. In particular, we provide a flexible and interactive mechanism to navigate guidelines and our ontology of interactions (between drugs, or between actions’ goals) at multiple levels of detail, focusing on specific parts of it (e.g., on a specific pair of actions, or of drugs) to look for interactions. We introduce the notion of “navigation tree”, as the basic data structure to support multiple-level interaction analysis, and describe navigation and focusing algorithms operating on it. We also introduce a visualization tool that is based on the “navigation tree”, and further enhances the user-friendliness of our approach.