Proposing a Quality Model for Evaluating and Identifying Opportunities in Clinical Practice Guideline Engines

Abstract

Over the last decade, clinical practice guidelines (CPGs) have become an important asset for daily life in healthcare organizations. Efficient CPG management and digitization can improve the quality of patient care and healthcare by reducing variability. CPG digitization, however, is a difficult, complex task because such guidelines are usually expressed as text, and this often results in the development of partial software solutions. There are currently many CPG suites (CPGS) for managing the CPG lifecycle, but they do not all provide full support for this lifecycle, making it more difficult to choose the one which will best meet the specific needs and requirements of a healthcare organization. This paper proposes a quality model which makes it possible to compare CPGs by highlighting each phase of the lifecycle. The research was conducted using a methodology that combined a systematic literature review with quality models. The paper also discusses how the proposed model was instantiated to evaluate and compare several current CPG-based execution systems.