Implementation of Dynamic Taxonomies for Clinical Guideline Retrieval

Therapeutic Guideline Limited (TGL) is an Australian medical guideline publishing house. This paper discusses appropriate ways of using TGL content in a computer implemented guideline (CIG). Existing CIG representations are reviewed in light of TGL features such as the need for incremental development, strong existing relationship with guideline consumers, broad shallow guideline content, need for opportunistic integration into medical records systems, and desire to increase guideline usage. We suggest that guideline usage will be increased by facilitating information retrieval. Dynamic Taxonomy is proposed as an appropriate vehicle for this task. Dynamic Taxonomy is an indexing/browsing scheme that uses existing medical taxonomies to expand the number of paths into the guidelines. This is then browsed via a dynamically generated index tree. The complexity is kept manageable through a conceptual zoom, which restricts the tree to a related subset of the guidelines and their corresponding