ROAD2H: Development and evaluation of an open‐source explainable artificial intelligence approach for managing co‐morbidity and clinical guidelines

Abstract

Abstract Introduction Clinical decision support (CDS) systems (CDSSs) that integrate clinical guidelines need to reflect real‐world co‐morbidity. In patient‐specific clinical contexts, transparent recommendations that allow for contraindications and other conflicts arising from co‐morbidity are a requirement. In this work, we develop and evaluate a non‐proprietary, standards‐based approach to the deployment of computable guidelines with explainable argumentation, integrated with a commercial electronic health record (EHR) system in Serbia, a middle‐income country in West Balkans. Methods We used an ontological framework, the Transition‐based Medical Recommendation (TMR) model, to represent, and reason about, guideline concepts, and chose the 2017 International global initiative for chronic obstructive lung disease (GOLD) guideline and a Serbian hospital as the deployment and evaluation site, respectively. To mitigate potential guideline conflicts, we used a TMR‐based implementation of the Assumptions‐Based Argumentation framework extended with preferences and Goals (ABA+G). Remote EHR integration of computable guidelines was via a microservice architecture based on HL7 FHIR and CDS Hooks. A prototype integration was developed to manage chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) with comorbid cardiovascular or chronic kidney diseases, and a mixed‐methods evaluation was conducted with 20 simulated cases and five pulmonologists. Results Pulmonologists agreed 97% of the time with the GOLD‐based COPD symptom severity assessment assigned to each patient by the CDSS, and 98% of the time with one of the proposed COPD care plans. Comments were favourable on the principles of explainable argumentation; inclusion of additional co‐morbidities was suggested in the future along with customisation of the level of explanation with expertise. Conclusion An ontological model provided a flexible means of providing argumentation and explainable artificial intelligence for a long‐term condition. Extension to other guidelines and multiple co‐morbidities is needed to test the approach further.

Keywords

• argumentation
• CDS hooks
• clinical decision support systems
• co‐morbidity
• FHIR
• Transition‐based Medical Recommendation model