Representing Medication Guidelines for Use in Production Rule Systems in the Context of Polypharmacy

This paper presents an approach to represent medication guidelines in a machine readable form for its use within a home care environment for elderly patients with chronic diseases. The overall system comprises a patient-centred integrated care environment, supported by computerized systems to improve the quality of home hospitalization. One component of the system is a decision support system for improving the medication of elderly patients. For this purpose, a machine actionable version of standardized medication guidelines was required. However, such version was not available, the translation of the guidelines from human readable into machine readable rules and the implementation are complex and pose many challenges e.g. ambiguity of the rules. Scope of this work included the design and implementation of such a rule base. Guidelines were selected based on their prominence in the domain and analyzed for their structure to allow for the creation of templates, which can be used in the automatic generation of rules. The templates were designed to work with the Drools business rule management system. While still simple, the current prototype shows good performance and potential for future extensions.