A framework for defining and verifying clinical guidelines: a case study on cancer screening

Medical guidelines are clinical behaviour recommendations used to help and support physicians in the definition of the most appropriate diagnosis and/or therapy within determinate clinical circumstances. Due to the intrinsic complexity of such guidelines, their application is not a trivial task; hence it is important to verify if health-care workers behave in a conform manner w.r.t. the intended model, and to evaluate how much their behaviour differs. In this paper we present the GPROVE framework that we are developing within a regional project to describe medical guidelines in a visual way and to automatically perform the conformance verification.