Assessment of Clinical Guideline Models Based on Metrics for Business Process Models Mar Marcos 1? , Joaqu´ ın Torres-Sospedra 2 , and Bego˜ na Mart´ ınez-Salvador 1 1 Dept. of Computer Engineering and Science, Universitat Jaume I Av. de Vicent Sos Baynat s/n, 12071 Castell´ on, Spain 2 Institute of New Imaging Technologies, Universitat Jaume I Av. de Vicent Sos Baynat s/n, 12071 Castell´ on, Spain Abstract. The formalisation of clinical guidelines is a long and demand- ing task which usually involves both clinical and IT staff. Because of the features of guideline representation languages, a clear understanding of the final guideline model may prove complicated for clinicians. In this context, an assessment of the understandability of the guideline model becomes crucial. In the field of Business Process Modelling (BPM) there is research on structural metrics and their connection with the quality of process models, concretely with understandability and modifiability. In this paper we adapt the structural metrics that have been proposed in the field of BPM in terms of the features of a specific guideline repre- sentation language, which is PROforma. Additionally, we present some experiments consisting in the application of these adapted metrics to the assessment of guideline models described in PROforma. Although it has not been possible to draw meaningful conclusions on the overall quality of the models, our experiments have served to shed light on im- portant aspects to be considered, such as the hierarchical decomposition of processes. Keywords: Clinical guidelines, formalisation of clinical guidelines, eval- uation of clinical guideline models. 1 Introduction The formalisation of clinical guidelines is a long and demanding task which usu- ally requires the involvement of both clinical and IT staff. On one hand, clinical knowledge is required for a proper understanding of most of the contents of guideline texts. On the other hand, knowledge engineering skills are required to analyse the clinical procedures they contain and to describe them in terms of the guideline representation language of choice. This is because guideline lan- guages are not always accessible for clinicians. To alleviate this problem, several works propose a gradual formalisation process. For instance, some authors use ? This work has been supported by Universitat Jaume I through the research project P1·1B2013-15.