Modeling Clinical Guidelines: Challenges and Solutions
The modeling of systems is an important step in system development. It facilitates communication between system developers and users, increases the understanding of the system under development, and enables testing, simulating, and analyzing system structure and behavior. Many modeling methodologies exist for developing software systems. Modeling of bio-medical systems involves challenges that go beyond modeling of standard software systems. The challenges include, among others, the ability to represent, in human-readable and machine-interpretable manner, large amounts of complex data and knowledge that is unstable and undergo changes. The data and knowledge are complex because they have different characteristics, come from different resources, follow different naming conventions, are often vague, uncertain, or incomplete, and are encompassing different levels of granularity. I will discuss the challenges in modeling one kind of bio-medical system, namely, clinical guidelines, and the way in which those challenges are being addressed.