News Story

Medical Guidelines Project Launched

Friday 23 Oct 1998

KMi’s role in European-funded research continued to expand this week with the signing of a 262KECU (£187K) contract under the EU INCO-Copernicus initiative. The full project, entitled “Medical Guideline Technology: Representing, Interpreting and Sharing Cost-effective Standards”, resulted from a successful bid by Dr. Zdenek Zdrahal. The project brings 105KECU (£75K) to KMi, and involves partners from Maastricht University (NL), Czech Academy of Sciences (CZ), University of Economics (CZ), and The Centre for Informatics, Health Statistics and Medical Documentation (RO). The project, which builds on KMi’s existing knowledge modelling expertise, aims to develop methodology and software support for creating, representing and applying medical guidelines. In particular, the project goals are:

Design and implementation of techniques for computer representation of medical guidelines (MGL) which integrate generic recommendations for specific medical circumstances (generic medical guidelines) with site-specific conditions (site ontology) and an applicable cost model.
Design of a computational model for applying MGL to uncertain or incomplete patient data and implementation of reasoning algorithms for calculating optimal decision with respect to the given MGL, cost model and a selected criterion.
Three pilot applications in the same medical domain but in countries with significant differences in the health care system, available resources and organisational structure (both from EU and CCE). Evaluation and comparison of benefits for the different health care conditions will be undertaken.