Simulating Clinical Guidelines for Medical Education

Education is notoriously a challenging task in the healthcare context, where several new methodologies are being introduced to complement "traditional" learning. In particular, the importance of approaches based on (i) simulation and on (ii) clinical practice guidelines is continuously growing. While until now such approaches have been developed separately, in this paper we propose the first approach to education in medicine exploiting both techniques (i) and (ii). Indeed, clinical practice guidelines encode the best medical practices, and, in conjunction with simulation techniques, are suitable to teach "how to operate" on patients, but without the need of "physically" having\acting on real patients. In this paper, we propose such a new methodology, based on GLARE-Edu, an educational extension of GLARE (Guideline Acquisition, Representation and Execution), a domain-independent system for the management of GLs. GLARE-Edu can be used to "simulate" the direct application of GL "best practices" to a (simulated) patient or to provide a "second opinion" simulation: a student must indicate how s\he would treat a (real or invented) patient, and the system is used to indicate to the student where s\he has followed the recommendations of the GL, and where s\he has violated them.