An engine for compliance checking of clinical guidelines.

Although, clinical guidelines are regarded as best practices for clinicians, clinician activities are not always compliant with guideline recommendations. This paper aims to improve clinician compliance with guidelines. We have developed an engine to automatically report three non-compliance situations: 1) guideline recommendations exist, and the clinician performed some activities, but not according to the guidelines; 2) guideline recommendations exist, but the clinician did nothing; 3) guideline recommendations do not exist, but the clinician performed some activities. In particular, we highlight effective time for compliance checking, as well as membership, numeric relationships, concept subsumption and contextualization. We deployed our engine to a clinical setting involving the daily care routine of diabetes patients, and generated non-compliance reports for pilot users.