Toward a Clinical Point of Care Tool for Managing Heart Failure.

Management of heart failure is a major challenge in health care. Optimal management of heart failure requires adherence to evidence-based clinical guidelines. The nearly 80-page guideline for heart failure management is very complex. As a result, clinical guidelines are difficult to implement and are adopted slowly by the medical community at large. In this paper we describe a heart failure treatment adviser system which automates the reasoning process required to comply with the heart failure management guideline. The system is able to correctly compute guideline- compliant treatment recommendations for a given patient. For each recommendation, justification is also given by the system. We illustrate the technical aspect of the implementation of the system as well as some primitive user interfaces associated with the system's core functionality. A simulated case is presented with system-generated recommendations and justifications.