December 22, 2007
Proteus Intelligent Clinical Guidelines
In Greek mythology, Proteus is the sea god who possessed the knowledge about everything and had the ability to change shape at will. Today, Proteus is also an Acronym - PROcesses and Transactions Editable by USers. Starting this month, Proteus tools are now Free/Open Source.
It is a software technology that allows creating clinical executable decision support guidelines with little effort. According to the company website, it is 'a software tool that allows creating and executing clinical decision support guidelines using the Proteus approach. The tool called Protean may be downloaded from here. Protean allows creating new guidelines or editing existing ones very easily. Much of the editing is done by dragging and dropping.'
Quick Overview
The Proteus guidelines are created with modular entities called Knowledge Components (KCs). Each KC represents a clinical activity and is available to the clinician as a module of executable knowledge with its own intelligence.
The KCs may be easily modified
The KCs may be reused
Experts at remote locations may manage individual KCs, keeping them in sync with the current medical concepts, while the clinicians automatically get the state-of-the-art executable knowledge
The intelligent decision-making in the KC comes from the Inference Tools in the Proteus approach
The KCs offer a template for capturing data pertaining to the clinical activity that they represent and serve as components of an Electronic Medical Record.
Since the KCs represent discretely identifiable clinical activities they also allow attaching related elements from the non-clinical processes of healthcare. Each such non-clinical process can be assigned a separate layer, with components within it communicating with a logically related KC in the clinical process.