MHB – A Many-Headed Bridge Between Informal and Formal Guideline Representations

Clinical guidelines are becoming more and more important as a means to improve the quality of care by supporting medical staff. Modelling guidelines in a computer-processable form is a prerequisite for various computer applications, to improve the quality of guidelines and to support their application. However, transforming the original text into a formal guideline representation is a difficult task requiring both the skills of a computer scientist and medical knowledge. To bridge this gap, we have designed an intermediate representation called the MHB. It is a Many-Headed Bridge between informal representations such as free text and tables and more formal representations such as Asbru, GLIF, or PROforma. Obtaining an MHB representation from free text should be easier than modelling in a more formal representation because the vague expressions found in the guideline do not need to be replaced by precise information immediately.