Supporting physicians in the detection of the interactions between treatments of co-morbid patients

The treatment of patients affected by multiple diseases (comorbid patients) is one of the main challenges for modern healthcare. Clinical practice guidelines are widely used to support physicians, providing them evidence-based information of interventions, but only on individual pathologies. This sets up the urgent need of developing methodologies to support physicians in the detection of interactions between guidelines, to help them in the treatment of comorbid patients. In this chapter, the authors identify different levels of abstractions in the analysis of interactions, based on both the hierarchical organization of clinical guidelines (in which composite actions are refined into their components) and the hierarchy of drug categories. They then propose a general methodology (data/knowledge structures and reasoning algorithms operating on them) supporting user-driven and flexible interaction detection over multiple levels of abstraction.