Supporting human interaction and human resources coordination in distributed clinical guidelines

Clinical guidelines (GL) play an important role in medical practice: the one of optimizing the quality of patient care on the basis of the best and most recent evidence based medicine. In order to achieve this goal, the interaction between different actors, who cooperate in the execution of the same GL, is a crucial issue. As a matter of fact, in many cases (e.g. in chronic disease treatment) the GL execution requires that patient treatment is not performed/completed in the hospital, but is continued in different contexts (e.g. at home, or in the general practitioner's ambulatory), under the responsibility of different actors. In this situation, the correct interaction and communication between the actors themselves is critical for the quality of care, and human resources coordination is a key issue to be addressed by the managers of the involved healthcare service. In this paper we describe how computerized GL management can be extended in order to support such needs, and we illustrate our approach by means of a practical case study.