Controlled natural language for clinical practice guidelines?

Clinicians would benefit from decision support systems in- corporating the knowledge of clinical practice guidelines. However, the unstructured form of the guidelines makes them unsuitable for formal representation. To remedy this shortcoming we translated a set of pediatric guidelines into Attempto Controlled English (ACE). An experienced pediatrician and a knowledge engineer assessed that ACE can accurately represent the clinical concepts and the proposed actions of the guidelines. Currently, we are developing a systematic and replicable approach to authoring guideline recommendations in ACE.