Ali Rahmanzadeh

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.

Medical knowledge is traditionally disseminated via the publication of documents and through participation in clinical practice. Information technology offers to extend both modes of dissemination, via electronic publishing and virtual reality training, for example. AI promises even more radical changes through the possibility of publishing clinical expertise in the form of expert systems, which assist patient care through active decision support and workflow management. PROforma is a knowledge representation language that is designed to support this new mode of dissemination. It is based on an intuitive model of the processes of care and well-understood logical semantics. This paper provides a description of the language and associated software tools, and discusses its potential roles in, and implications for, medical knowledge publishing.