http://www.glif.org/glif_main.html
Clinical practice guidelines and protocols are being applied in
diverse areas including policy development, utilization management,
education, reference, clinical decision support, conduct of clinical
trials, and workflow facilitation. Many parties are engaged in
developing guidelines, an arduous task with much redundancy and
overlap among the resulting products, but there is little
standardization to facilitate sharing or to enable adaptation to
local practice settings.
GLIF is a specification for structured representation of guidelines.
It was developed by the InterMed Collaboratory in order to facilitate
sharing of clinical guidelines (Ohno-Machado, Gennari et al. 1998).
The InterMed collaboratory was a joint project of medical informatics
laboratories at Harvard (the Decision Systems Group at Brigham and
Women's Hospital and Laboratory of Computer Science at Massachusetts
General Hospital), Stanford, Columbia, and McGill Universities
(Shortliffe, Barnett et al. 1996). That work is being continued under
new funding by a subgroup of the InterMed collaborators, including
the Decision Systems Group at Harvard, McGill, Columbia, Stanford,
and the American College of Physicans-American Society of Internal
Medicine. The objective of the GLIF specification is to provide a
representation for guidelines that have the following characteristics:
* Precise
* Non-ambiguous
* Human-readable
* Computable (in the sense that guidelines specified in GLIF may be
used for computer-based decision support)
* Independent of computing platforms (thus enabling sharing of
guidelines)
Version 2.0 of GLIF (GLIF2) was published in 1998 (Ohno-Machado,
Gennari et al. 1998). That version of GLIF has been the basis for
several implementations of guideline-based applications, including
one in the Brigham's BICS information system (Zielstorff, Teich et
al. 1998). Web-based applications for driving clinical consultations
(Boxwala, Greenes et al. 1999), and applications that search for
eligible clinical protocols (Ohno-Machado, Wang et al. 1999).
