Design and Thought for Establishing Decision Trees Based on Clinical Practice Guidelines

Clinical practice guidelines can facilitate the standardization of the diagnosis and treatment and improve health care quality. However, there are barriers to guideline dissemination and implementation, thus impeding the standardization of clinical practice and improvement of patient outcomes. One major barrier is that it is difficult for doctors to read and understand the unstructured text-based guidelines, and apply them in real clinical practice. This paper introduces the design of decision trees based on clinical practice guidelines, and the advantages, challenges and solutions of this approach, with the hope of providing references for promoting the transformation of textual clinical practice guidelines.