Disseminating medical knowledge: the PROforma approach

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.