The PROTOCURE project is funded by the Future and
Emerging Technologies arm of the IST
program, FET-Open scheme, under contract number
IST-2001-33049. PROTOCURE is an assessment project running from
December 1, 2001, and has a duration of 12 months.
(See also the Project presentation deliverable)
During the last decade, the approach of evidence-based medicine has given rise to an increasing number of clinical practice guidelines and protocols. They provide clinicians with health-care recommendations based on valid and up-to-date empirical evidence. In this way, they facilitate the spreading of high standard practices that otherwise would have much less impact. Moreover, it has been proved that adherence to guidelines and protocols may reduce health-care costs up to a 25%.
A high number of medical guidelines have been published in the literature and Internet, making them more accessible. However, the work done on developing and distributing guidelines far outweighs the efforts on guaranteeing their quality. Indeed, anomalies like ambiguity and incompleteness are frequent in medical guidelines. Even more, they can be inconsistent because of the lack of familiarity of the designer with certain principles and notations. The most important consequence of these problems is that they preclude the effective application of guidelines.
Recent efforts have tried to address the problem of guideline quality improvement. The medical community has sought to organise and integrate guidelines into compendiums, to make them more accessible, usable and comprehensible. With the aim of ensuring a high degree of quality, the organisations promoting these initiatives have also set minimal standards for the inclusion of guidelines in the compendiums. These standards take into account, for instance, the relevance and validity of the sources employed for the development of the guidelines. These approaches are not sufficient since they rely on informal processes and notations. As a result, many practical guidelines are still ambiguous, incomplete or inconsistent. Even when ambiguity or incompleteness are intentionally included in guidelines by the designer, so that organisational or personal practices can be deployed at certain points, it is important to make them explicit as choices. A substantially different approach, grounded on a formal representation of guidelines, can answer these needs.
An appropriate representation language, with a clear and well-defined semantics, would allow for a systematic verification of guidelines by formal methods. Unlike the after-dissemination activities mentioned before, this approach would make quality improvement possible during the stage of guideline development.
Research from the fields of computer science and artificial intelligence can help in both the definition of an adequate guideline description language and the development of techniques for the formal analysis of guidelines. The language must give means to represent explicitly, and in a non-ambiguous way, all the relevant knowledge about guidelines. Based on the formal semantics of this language, the analysis techniques should allow for the determination of, for instance, completeness (no missing cases), consistency (no contradictions) and correctness (objectives are satisfied).
The solution suggested to the problem of quality improvement of protocols consists in the utilisation of formal methods. It supposes the definition of an adequate protocol representation language, the development of techniques for the formal analysis of protocols described in that language, and more importantly, the evaluation of the feasibility of the approach based on the formalisation and verification of real-life medical protocols. For the first two aspects we will rely on earlier work by consortium partners, on the Asbru language for protocol description and on the KIV interactive verification system. The third aspect, namely the evaluation of the feasibility of the use of formal methods for quality improvement of protocols, constitutes the main objective of this assessment project.
We will rely on earlier work by consortium partners, in particular, on the Asbru language for protocol representation and on the KIV interactive verifier system. This leads to the following tasks: