Selective dissemination of clinical guidelines in healthcare communities

Selective dissemination of information (SDI) refers to methods, which are used to keep a user informed about new information on specified subject area. In this paper, we deal with SDI in healthcare communities. Their members include healthcare authorities and organizations as well as medical societies. We have restricted ourselves on SDI within the scope of Evidence Based Medicine (EMB). It emphasizes the use of medical evidence in decision-making. Within EBM, each clinician is assumed to be familiar with the clinical guidelines of his or her profession. Our research has focused around this challenge, i.e., ensuring that clinicians are aware of the relevant clinical guidelines. In particular, we have analyzed how modern ICT-technologies such as Semantic web technologies can be exploited in managing this problem. The corner stones of our solution are two overlapping ontologies, which are called the Profile ontology and the Guideline ontology. The former ontology models clinicians' job specific aspects such as their roles, skills and competences while the latter ontology models clinical guidelines and their relationships to roles, skills and competences. We will show that by means of these ontologies and by using a query processor (a SPARQL engine) we can automatically connect guidelines to relevant clinicians, and vice versa.