Enabling Medical Expert Critiquing Using a Bdi Approach

Expert critiquing systems were introduced to assist physicians in decision making, without forcing them to comply to a gold standard of care. Critiquing systems do this by providing critique on a physician’s decisions, rather than telling him/her exactly what to do. In order to perform this task, a critiquing system must have knowledge of the diagnosis and the treatment processes, and must be able to link the actions preformed by a physician to this knowledge. The development of formal languages for describing medical guidelines (protocols) and the nationwide introduction of electronic patient records (EPR) in the Netherlands, facilitates the development of a new generation of medical critiquing systems. Essential to the success of the new generation critiquing systems is the ability to match the actions prescribed in a medical guideline to the physician’s actions reported in the EPR. Some authors have claimed that such a matching process is infeasible. This paper will show, however, that a BDI (beliefs, desires and intentions) approach enables a highly successful matching process thereby enabling expert critiquing based on an EPR.