Published in:
Open Access 01-12-2017 | Technical advance
Applying openEHR’s Guideline Definition Language to the SITS international stroke treatment registry: a European retrospective observational study
Published in: BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making | Issue 1/2017
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Background
Interoperability standards intend to standardise health information, clinical practice guidelines intend to standardise care procedures, and patient data registries are vital for monitoring quality of care and for clinical research. This study combines all three: it uses interoperability specifications to model guideline knowledge and applies the result to registry data.
Methods
We applied the openEHR Guideline Definition Language (GDL) to data from 18,400 European patients in the Safe Implementation of Treatments in Stroke (SITS) registry to retrospectively check their compliance with European recommendations for acute stroke treatment.
Results
Comparing compliance rates obtained with GDL to those obtained by conventional statistical data analysis yielded a complete match, suggesting that GDL technology is reliable for guideline compliance checking.
Conclusions
The successful application of a standard guideline formalism to a large patient registry dataset is an important step toward widespread implementation of computer-interpretable guidelines in clinical practice and registry-based research. Application of the methodology gave important results on the evolution of stroke care in Europe, important both for quality of care monitoring and clinical research.