Checking the quality of clinical guidelines using automated reasoning tools

Requirements about the quality of clinical guidelines can be represented by schemata borrowed from the theory of abductive diagnosis, using temporal logic to model the time-oriented aspects expressed in a guideline. Previously, we have shown that these requirements can be verified using interactive theorem proving techniques. In this paper, we investigate how this approach can be mapped to the facilities of a resolution-based theorem prover, otter and a complementary program that searches for finite models of first-order statements, mace-2. It is shown that the reasoning required for checking the quality of a guideline can be mapped to such a fully automated theorem-proving facilities. The medical quality of an actual guideline concerning diabetes mellitus 2 is investigated in this way.