Improving Adherence to Heart Failure Management Guidelines via Abductive Reasoning

TL;DR

This paper presents a physician advisory system that uses abductive reasoning and answer set programming to improve adherence to heart failure management guidelines by identifying missing patient symptoms and conditions.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach combining abductive reasoning with ASP to enhance guideline adherence in heart failure management.

Findings

System effectively identifies missing symptoms for treatment applicability

Helps physicians make guideline-compliant recommendations

Potential to improve clinical decision-making processes

Abstract

Management of chronic diseases such as heart failure (HF) is a major public health problem. A standard approach to managing chronic diseases by medical community is to have a committee of experts develop guidelines that all physicians should follow. Due to their complexity, these guidelines are difficult to implement and are adopted slowly by the medical community at large. We have developed a physician advisory system that codes the entire set of clinical practice guidelines for managing HF using answer set programming(ASP). In this paper we show how abductive reasoning can be deployed to find missing symptoms and conditions that the patient must exhibit in order for a treatment prescribed by a physician to work effectively. Thus, if a physician does not make an appropriate recommendation or makes a non-adherent recommendation, our system will advise the physician about symptoms and conditions that must be in effect for that recommendation to apply. It is under consideration for acceptance in TPLP.