Abstract
PROforma is a language for describing the actions, information and decisions required in patient care. It is the basis of a method for defining best-practice guidelines, research protocols and other procedures in a form that can be enacted by a computer to help clinical professionals comply with preferred practice. Use of the method consists of outlining the clinical tasks required by the procedure, and specifying details using standard templates for each class of task. This paper presents a description of the PROforma language, and associated protocol development and enactment software, illustrated with examples. Our aim is to develop PROforma as a possible standard for representing clinical procedures; the present version (1.5) is presented as a basis for discussion and is subject to revision.
This work was carried out as part of the PROMPT project (PROtocols for medical Procedures and Therapies), project number HC1041 in the EU's Healthcare Telematics Programme and in association with the ACTION cluster of projects funded under this programme.
Many people have influenced the development of the concepts and software described here. We would particularly like to thank Subrata Das, David Elsdon, Claude Gierl, Paul Ferguson and Saki Hajnal who made important contributions in earlier projects.
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Fox, J., Johns, N., Rahmanzadeh, A. (1997). Protocols for medical procedures and therapies: A provisional description of the PROforma language and tools. In: Keravnou, E., Garbay, C., Baud, R., Wyatt, J. (eds) Artificial Intelligence in Medicine. AIME 1997. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1211. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0029433
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0029433
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