New approaches to linking clinical guidelines to virtual patients.

An often reported challenge of evidence-based medicine concerns increasing use of clinical guidelines in practice. One of the proposed improvements is to promote guidelines by presenting them in conjunction with virtual patients. Three approaches to linking clinical guidelines to virtual patients are presented in this paper: (1) guidelines as a source for generating virtual patients; (2) guidelines hyper-flowchart as a virtual patient progress indicator; (3) guidelines flowchart reconstruction as a learning activity in virtual patient systems. The scenarios have been preliminarily evaluated using two demonstrator applications: Bit Pathways and CASUS. Challenges and direction for further development are proposed.