Abstract. Medical guidelines and protocols are documents aimed at improving the quality of medical care by offering support in medical decision making in the form of management recommendations based on scientific evidence. Whereas medical guidelines are intended for nation-wide use, and thus omit medical management details that may differ among hospitals, medical protocols are aimed at local use within hospitals and, therefore, include detailed information. Although a medical guideline and protocol concerning the management of a particular disorder are related to each other, one question is to what extent they are different. Formal methods are applied to shed light on this issue. A Dutch medical guideline regarding the treatment of breast cancer, and a Dutch protocol based on it, are taken as an example. 1

Abstract—The application of a medical guideline to the treatment of a patient’s disease can be seen as the execution of tasks, sequentially or in parallel, in the face of patient data. It has been shown that many of such guidelines can be represented as a “network of tasks, ” that is, as a sequence of steps that have a specific function or goal. In this paper, a novel methodology for verifying the quality of such guidelines is introduced. To investigate the quality of such guidelines, we propose to include medical background knowledge to task networks and to formalize criteria for good medical practice that a guideline should comply with. This framework was successfully applied to a guideline dealing with the management of diabetes mellitus type 2 by using KIV. Index Terms—Medical guidelines, background knowledge, formal verification, temporal logic. Ç 1