From Clinical Requirement to Personalized Wellness Decision Support: A Data-driven Framework for Computer-Supported Guideline Refinement

Personalized wellness decision support has gained significant attention, owing to the shift to a patient-centric paradigm in healthcare domains, and the consequent availability of a wealth of patient-related data. Despite the success of data-driven analytics in improving practice outcome, there is a gap towards their deployment in guideline-based practice. In this paper we report on findings related to computer-supported guideline refinement, which maps a patient's guideline requirements to personalized recommendations that suit the patient's current context. In particular, we present a novel data-driven personalization framework, casting the mapping task as a statistical decision problem in search of a solution to maximize expected utility. The proposed framework is well suited to produce personalized recommendations based on not only clinical factors but contextual factors that reflect individual differences in non-clinical settings. We then describe its implementation within the guideline-based clinical decision support system and discuss opportunities and challenges looking forward.