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Clinical guidelines and clinical pathways are accepted and proven instruments for quality assurance and process optimization in the healthcare domain. To derive clinical pathways from clinical guidelines, the imprecise, non-formalized abstract guidelines must be formalized. The transfer of evidence-based knowledge (clinical guidelines) to care processes (clinical pathways) is not straightforward due to different information contents and semantical constructs. A complex step within this formalization process is the mark-up step and annotation of the text passages to terminologies. The Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) provides a common reference terminology as well as the semantic link for combining the clinical pathways to patient-specific information. This paper proposes a semi-automated mark-up and UMLS annotation for clinical guidelines by using natural language processing techniques. The algorithm has been tested and evaluated using a German breast cancer guideline.

Interdisciplinary and intersectoral coordinated healthcare management based on Clinical Practice Guidelines is essential to achieve high quality in oncological networks. The objective of our research project is to create a cookbook, which can be used by oncological networks as a template. The cookbook is based on guideline-compliant care processes. To develop these care processes, the three S3-guidelines breast, colon and prostate carcinoma have been formalized. The thus-obtained platform-independent process fragments were transformed into an underlying metamodel, which is based on HL7 and can be used for modeling clinical pathways. Additional, qualitative guided interviews were chosen to capitalize on the experts' (e.g. chief residents, resident specialists) wide knowledge and experience in oncological health care management. One of these use cases (tumor board scheduling) is developed for a healthcare management platform which is linked to a national electronic case record. The projected result of our approach is a cookbook which shows, how the treatment can be controlled by interdisciplinary and intersectoral care processes in an oncological network.

Healthcare providers are facing an enormous cost pressure, wherefore the assurance of an efficient care on a high level of quality is of decisive importance. Clinical guidelines and clinical pathways have been established for that purpose. Clinical guidelines offer abstract recommendations for diagnostic and therapeutic issues, while clinical pathways are a road map of patient management. The consideration of clinical guidelines during pathway development is highly recommended. But the transfer of evident knowledge (clinical guidelines) to care processes (clinical pathways) is not straightforward due to different information contents and semantical constructs. This article proposes a model-driven approach in conjunction with a developed knowledge acquisition tool to improve the development of guideline-compliant pathways.

Clinical guidelines and clinical pathways are accepted instruments for quality assurance and process optimization. Defining a standardized patient treatment for a specific disease clinical guidelines provide evident medical knowledge for diagnostic and therapeutic issues in form of narrative recommendations. Clinical pathways offer process-like descriptions defining daily diagnostic and treatment procedures. The use of evident knowledge (in form of clinical guidelines) during pathway development is highly recommended. But the transfer of unstructured recommendations to care processes (clinical pathways) is not straightforward. This article proposes a model-based approach to support the development of guideline-compliant pathways and focuses their deployment into different target systems. Especially HIS (hospital information system) are considered as this is the critical system for managing patient care processes in the hospital. So the results of latest research provided by clinical guidelines are implemented into daily practice and therefore improve patient care.