Incremental guideline formalization with tool support

Guideline formalization is recognized as an important component in improving computerized guidelines, which in turn leads to better informedness, lower inter-practician variability and, ultimately, to higher quality healthcare. By means of a modeling exercise, we investigate the role of guideline formalization tools which use two different knowledge transformation principles in producing re-usable knowledge objects useful for representing medical processes and performing updates of medical guidelines. We give a general evaluation of usefulness and state the main requirements for tools that reuse medical knowledge and support authoring of guidelines.