Modeling Clinical Protocols Using Semantic MediaWiki: The case of the Oncocure Project

A computerized Decision Support Systems (DSS) can improve theadherence of the clinicians to clinical guidelines and protocols. The building ofa prescriptive DSS based on breast cancer treatment protocols and its integrationwith a legacy Electronic Patient Record is the aim of the Oncocure project. An importanttask of this project is the encoding of the protocols in computer-executableform — a task that requires the collaboration of physicians and computer scientistsin a distributed environment. In this paper, we describe our project and howsemantic wiki technology was used for the encoding task. Semantic wiki technologyfeatures great flexibility, allowing to mix unstructured information andsemantic annotations, and to automatically generate the final model with minimaladaptation cost. These features render semantic wikis natural candidates forsmall to medium scale modeling tasks, where the adaptation and training effort ofbigger systems cannot be justified. This approach is not constrained to a specificprotocol modeling language, but can be used as a collaborative tool for other languages.When implemented, our DSS is expected to reduce the cost of care whileimproving the adherence to the guideline and the quality of the documentation.