Web-Serving Health with ST-Guide M´ arcio Paix˜ ao Dantas, Jacques Wainer and Cleo Zanella Billa Institute of Computing, Unicamp, Brazil E-mail: marcio.dantas@students.ic.unicamp.br, wainer@ic.unicamp.br Abstract ST-Guide is a computer-interpretable clinical guidelines development, verification, and implementation project fo- cused on primary care to chronic disease patients. It can be used to implement guides in different modes: authoritar- ian, apprentice, specialist, and auditor. Only specialist and authoritarian modes are functional in this release. This pa- per presents the project’s web services module, which com- plies to WSDL and SOAP open standards. ST-Guide’s web services architecture allows external computer systems to implement guidelines independently of its underlying oper- ating system and programming language. The kind of tech- nology presented in this paper is considered fundamental to widespread highest standard medical knowledge. 1. Introduction Guidelines are produced by a set of experts that, based on scientific evidence, describe an effective procedure to treat and manage a particular disease. The Institute of Medicine [11] defines “Clinical practice guidelines are systematically developed statements to assist practitioner and patient deci- sions about appropriate health care for specific clinical cir- cumstances.” There is some solid evidence that the adherence to guide- lines improve the quality of care [9], and there is a large body of research that attempts to implement computer sys- tems that embodies some of these clinical guidelines. The rationale is that by using such a computerized guideline the health care professional will have the proper decision sup- port at the appropriate moment during the care of the pa- tient. Wireless technology combined with small and powerful computing devices leads to an incredible scenario where all patient data acquirable to a physician can be broadcasted. In this context, medical specialist systems must be prepared to communicate with these devices, which can be very het- erogeneous, and to transmit recommendations or actions. ST-Guide[17] is a computer-interpretable clinical guide- line (CIG) development, verification, and implementation project focused on chronic diseases primary care. It can be used to implement guides in different modes: authoritar- ian, apprentice, specialist, and auditor. Many guides have been formalized using ST-Guide: hypertension[7], jaundice in healthy term newborns[12], prenatal care[1], and others. This paper presents the project’s webservices module, which complies to WSDL and SOAP[6] open standards. ST-Guide’s web services architecture allows external com- puter systems to implement guidelines in the available modes with very small effort, independently of their oper- ating system platform or programming language. On the following sections: related work, Section 2; ST-Guide and its interaction modes, Section 3; the web services module, Section 4; conclusions and future works, Section 5. 2. Related Work Medical systems and databases are being developed for more than 30 years past now and many are still in produc- tion. Differences between them can be found in all levels, from operating systems to data and document formats. System communication problems are recurrent in the area and many works have arisen to propose solutions. [10] uses web services as a middleware to allow users to explore external medical databases through standardized nomencla- ture queries. User queries are transformed by web services to the target data resource query language and after exe- cution the results are properly transformed and returned in XML[5] format to exhibition. To address the problem of composing new guidelines with components written and executed by different tech- nologies, [13] proposed a knowledge base of executable CIG components and extended PROforma’s [8] ontology, creating a new task, which represents a Common Object Request Architecture (CORBA)[15] or a web services ex- ternal component call. The 11th IEEE International Conference on Computational Science and Engineering - Workshops 978-0-7695-3257-8/08 $25.00 © 2008 IEEE DOI 276 The 11th IEEE International Conference on Computational Science and Engineering - Workshops 978-0-7695-3257-8/08 $25.00 © 2008 IEEE DOI 10.1109/CSEW.2008.13 276 The 11th IEEE International Conference on Computational Science and Engineering - Workshops 978-0-7695-3257-8/08 $25.00 © 2008 IEEE DOI 10.1109/CSEW.2008.13 276 The 11th IEEE International Conference on Computational Science and Engineering - Workshops 978-0-7695-3257-8/08 $25.00 © 2008 IEEE DOI 10.1109/CSEW.2008.13 276 The 11th IEEE International Conference on Computational Science and Engineering - Workshops 978-0-7695-3257-8/08 $25.00 © 2008 IEEE DOI 10.1109/CSEW.2008.13 276 The 11th IEEE International Conference on Computational Science and Engineering - Workshops 978-0-7695-3257-8/08 $25.00 © 2008 IEEE DOI 10.1109/CSEW.2008.13 276 The 11th IEEE International Conference on Computational Science and Engineering - Workshops 978-0-7695-3257-8/08 $25.00 © 2008 IEEE DOI 10.1109/CSEW.2008.13 288