Hypertextual navigation operationalizing generic clinical practice guidelines for patient-specific therapeutic decisions

Despite the proliferation of implemented clinical practice guidelines, there is still little evidence of physicians compliance to formal standards. The ONCODOC project proposes a framework for elaborating generic decision support guidelines in a document-based paradigm with a knowledge-based approach. It has been first applied to assist clinicians in the treatment of breast cancer patients. Therapeutic expertise has been encoded as a decision tree. The decision process is driven by the clinician who interactively browses a hypertext version of the decision tree. During the navigation, he incrementally assigns values to decision parameters on the basis of his free interpretation of his patient's condition and thus builds a clinical context leading to patient-specific therapeutic recommendations. These guidelines are distributed on a hospital intranet and are evaluated at the point of care in an oncology department.