Towards a formal representation of clinical practice guidelines for the treatment of comorbid patients

Clinical Practice Guidelines (CPGs) are standardized guidelines in prescribing the most appropriate medical treatment to patients with regard to relevant patient data and possible diagnoses. However due to the complexity it involves, concurrent applications of CPGs for the treatment of comorbid patients is quite limited in practice and accordingly the availability of foundational frameworks that supports formal CPG representation and reasoning is essential. In this paper, we propose adopting SCOPE (Situation Calculus Ontology of PEtri Nets), a formal framework that is based on Petri Nets and the Situation Calculus, for the CPG mitigation and integration. In particular, we argue that critical attributes such as iterations, concurrency, time and etc. that are needed to fully describe knowledge for the mitigation/integration of CPGs can be conveniently captured within this framework. An illustrative mitigation example is also given.