A Consistency Checker for verifying the knowledge encoded into clinical DSSs

The formalization and manipulation of complex and not yet assessed rules by clinicians are critical for Decision Support Systems (DSSs) performance in supporting remote monitoring of chronic patients. Sometimes, structural anomalies, such as inconsistency and redundancy, can occur. This work presents a novel system, named Consistency Checker, aimed at verifying the reliability of conditionaction clinical rules in knowledge-based DSSs. This system allows the verification of very complex rules having in their antecedent parts not only simple logical conditions, but also arithmetical expressions. Moreover, the Consistency Checker provides a new classification of the detected anomalies, aimed at fully describing the rule verification results, as well as a suitable knowledge representation formalism to encode condition-action rules in a general way. The system has been designed according to the Service Oriented Architecture and implemented as a Web Service within the CHRONIOUS Project.