A Computer-Interpretable Guideline for COVID-19: Rapid Development and Dissemination

Background: COVID-19 is a global pandemic that is affecting more than 200 countries worldwide. Efficient diagnosis and treatment are crucial to combat the disease. Computer-interpretable guidelines (CIGs) can aid the broad global adoption of evidence-based diagnosis and treatment knowledge. However, currently, no internationally shareable CIG exists. Objective: The aim of this study was to establish a rapid CIG development and dissemination approach and apply it to develop a shareable CIG for COVID-19. Methods: A 6-step rapid CIG development and dissemination approach was designed and applied. Processes, roles, and deliverable artifacts were specified in this approach to eliminate ambiguities during development of the CIG. The Guideline Definition Language (GDL) was used to capture the clinical rules. A CIG for COVID-19 was developed by translating, interpreting, annotating, extracting, and formalizing the Chinese COVID-19 diagnosis and treatment guideline. A prototype application was implemented to validate the CIG. Results: We used 27 archetypes for the COVID-19 guideline. We developed 18 GDL rules to cover the diagnosis and treatment suggestion algorithms in the narrative guideline. The CIG was further translated to object data model and Drools rules to facilitate its use by people who do not employ the non-openEHR archetype. The prototype application validated the correctness of the CIG with a public data set. Both the GDL rules and Drools rules have been disseminated on GitHub. Conclusions: Our rapid CIG development and dissemination approach accelerated the pace of COVID-19 CIG development. A validated COVID-19 CIG is now available to the public.