Evidence based clinical guidelines are systematically developed statements to assist practitioners and patient decisions about appropriate health care for specific circumstances. They provide clinicians with health­care recommendations based on valid and up­-to­-date empirical evidence, they improve health­care outcomes and reduce health­care costs up to a 25%. Increasingly, such guidelines are not only developed by experts but also include the perspectives of patient organisations. Patient versions of clinical guidelines are increasingly developed to enhance shared decision making and to promote patient self­-management.
The clinical guideline and its patient version are currently developed in isolation and the alignment of those versions is difficult both when developing and when updating the guideline.
We propose a method that is based on a generic computer model for guidelines from which we are able to generate a guideline version specific for different users (e.g. patients, experts, GPs and family members). We will investigate this method on a small scale by (1) modelling selected guideline fragments from expert and patient versions; (2) comparing the modelled fragments and (3) unifying these models in a single core­model (4) generate different version depending on the needs and wishes of the accompanying stakeholder groups.
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