The Avicena Project
Project overview
Funded from 2005 to 2007 by the Spanish Ministry of Industry, grants FIT 350300-2005-33 and 350300-2006-27.
This is a project in which we are concerned with the development of Clinical Practice Guidelines (CPG). CPG are a helpful tool for the administration of medical care. This project aims at the development of a framework for the development of CPG. CPG should be characterized by their flexibility, clinical applicability, clarity, documentation and elaboration after a suitably planned revision. A large number of CPG are currently available that have been developed by different organizations, but there are a lot of work to do for GPC to become executable.
Major efforts are being undertaken in the health domain today towards the standardization of healthcare processes, which have undergone a considerable development in the last few decades. From the point of view of business organization, the need for personalization and standardization is becoming increasingly clear. This is so because medical care tends to be individualized and homogeneous at any point of the system. The existence of an integral clinical information and process management system in hospitals has a positive impact on the quality of assistance and the efficiency of the health personnel. Successfully achieving this saves institutions from dedicating an excessive part of their human resources, including doctors themselves, to documentary and bureaucratic routines. Furthermore, a more efficient information management can be achieved, better supporting the work of doctors, who are thus not constrained to do without relevant information about her/his patients because retrieving it at the right time is not feasible.
To meet this combination of goals, it is essential to rely on suitable organizational means, such as Business Process Management (BPM) methodologies, and appropriate Information and Communication Technology (ICT) infrastructures for knowledge management in health structures. For this reason, enterprise management techniques need to be implemented in healthcare organizations, along with normalization standards, e.g. driven by symptomatology, techniques, or diagnosis. In this sense, the standardization of patient care through clinical practice guidelines provides significant benefits, since:
- Procedures are normalized, as guidelines establish the standard to guide the doctor’s action.
- Clinical evidences are systematized, allowing a fast knowledge transfer between organizations sustained by contrasted clinical evidences.
- Guideline establish the relevant information domain for a process, simplifying the access and management of this information.
- Patient care is personalized. Guidelines define the specific care system activity for a particular patient, rather than all possible patients. Assistance can be proactive and planned instead of reactive and spontaneous.
- Guidelines help the fast dissemination of new work practices, and help structure all the knowledge of a healthcare organization. When a new evidence or technique suggest the modification of guidelines, these are modified and transmitted to all the personnel in a homogeneous and immediate way.
Project participants
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Project publications
A Díez, A. Cortés, R. Gil, P. Castells, F Díez, J. M. Fuentes, Á. Valera.
AVICENA, an Ontology for the Design of Executable Clinical Practice Guidelines.
9th International Protégé Conference. Stanford, California,
July 2006.
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F. Díez, J. M. Fuentes, A. Valera, P. Castells, A. Díez, A. Cortés,
R. Gil. AVICENA: Gestión Guiada de Procesos en la atención
sanitaria. XI Congreso Nacional de Informática Médica (Informed
2006). Murcia, noviembre 2006.
Poster:
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F. Díez, J. M. Fuentes, A. Valera, P. Castells, A. Díez, A.
Cortés, R. Gil. AVICENA: Propuesta del modelo SCPG para la
formalización de GPC con información semántica. XI Congreso Nacional
de Informática Médica (Informed 2006). Murcia, noviembre 2006.
Poster:
PDF
SCGP Ontology. Technical Report FIT-350300-2005-33-1 (in Spanish).
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