Representing medication guidelines for use in production rule systems in the context of POLYCARE project

This paper presents an approach to represent medication guidelines in a machine readable form for its use within a production Home Care environment. Part of this work was developed under the scope of the POLYCARE project. The POLYCARE project aims at developing a patient-centred integrated care environment, supported by ICT systems to improve the quality of home hospitalization. Part of the project design is a decision support system for improving the medication of the elderly patients. For this, a machine actionable version of the medication guidelines to be used was needed. However, as none were freely available to the project, we used our own approach. Scope of this work is 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 generation of rules. The templates were designed to work with the Drools business rule management system. While still simple, the current rule base shows good performance and potential for future extensions. Freely available, open business rule management systems proved themselves sufficient for the task.