A strategy for developing practice guidelines for the icu using automated knowledge aquisition techniques

To implement practice guideline entry tools in a reminder system in order to provide decision support to health care workers in clinical care and emergency care environments. To design a knowledge acquisition envi- ronment that enables physicians to formulate, update, and verify guidelines without the assistance of a knowledge engi- neer. Methods.We developed a knowledge acquisition envi- ronment for the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) consisting of 1) a graphical knowledge acquisition tool, 2) tools that perform logical and semantic tests on proposed guidelines, 3) a Patient Data Management System (PDMS) containing clinical pa- tient data, and 4) an expert system that reminds ICU health care workers of inconsistencies between a treatment plan and implemented guidelines. Physicians enter the guidelines using the knowledge acquisition tool, after which consistency and correctness tests are performed on the guidelines. The guide- lines are then transferred to the knowledge base of the reminder system and validated by applying the new guide- lines to a large stored data set of previous patients. If the new guidelines are approved, they are exported to the reminder system that is used in daily practice. Results. ICU physicians used the knowledge acquisition tool to enter 58 guidelines into the reminder system's knowledge base. These guidelines were tested on a data set consisting of 803 previously admit- ted patients. As a result, 27 guidelines ¢red at least once, generating 406 reminders in total. Of the 406 generated reminders, 356 (88%) were issued correctly and 50 (12%) were false alarms. The reminders that were issued correctly involved 3 situations: 1) the database contained inconsistent or incomplete information, 2) the actions or decisions of the health care workers were not the most appropriate ones, and 3) there was a potential risk involved. All false alarms were caused by the fact that the corresponding guidelines were not speci¢c enough to handle certain exceptions. As a result of this analysis, the guidelines could be improved in such a way as to eliminate all false alarms. Conclusions. These ¢rst results demonstrate that this bottom-up knowledge acquisi- tion strategy, implemented by the automated knowledge acquisition tools, enables medical specialists to improve the quality of computer support in an ICU without assistance of a knowledge engineer