Using the extensible markup language (XML) in automated clinical practice guidelines.

Much work has been done in the area of web-based clinical practice guidelines. Issues such as representation, description, architectures, and implementation have been explored previously. Most if not all of these web-based applications rely exclusively on HTML, the HyperText Markup Language. In the process of prototyping a guideline service to be used in a diabetes operations improvement project, we developed a model for a guideline engine that makes use of the Extensible Markup Language (XML), both as an interface to the engine and as a vehicle for delivering structured guideline content. We feel that XML may offer advantages in implementing guideline services that are difficult (if not impossible) to accomplish with HTML alone.