On the Design of a Management Platform for Antibiotic Guidelines in the Intensive Care Unit

Clinical guidelines are used in the Intensive Care Unit to assist physicians and nurses in taking diagnostic or treatment decisions. Although these guidelines can be transformed into a computer executable format, they often are handwritten and not in a standardized format, which makes it difficult to convert them into working services. Moreover, manually translating guidelines can cause communication problems between software developers and the medical staff. Problems can also arise in the integration of clinical decision support into the clinical workflow and the uptake by doctors. To counter this, a modular, distributed, multi-tier framework was developed for translating guidelines into software applications and providing clinical decision support in the Intensive Care Unit. Different requirements were taken into account. The architecture has been implemented using Java Enterprise Edition. A service-oriented approach is used, allowing an easy introduction of new functionalities and integration with other systems. The architecture was evaluated with the antibiotic dosage guideline, which is used on a daily basis in the Intensive Care Unit.