Method of representation of BP guideline through Standardised notations/ languages for graphical representation of healthcare processes

Bridging the gap between clinical research and everyday healthcare practice requires finding ways to support guideline developers (health professionals, methodologists, epidemiologists, statisticians, and others) in making guidelines more understandable and implementable by users (clinicians, patients, and others). This awareness is the base on which National Research Council of Italy has developed its task by searching and implementing standardized languages / notations for the graphical representation of a guideline (TASK 3.4 - Represent the processes defined in a BP guideline on a specific RD Standardised). In this paper, we report the approach we used. The first step was to perform a literature analysis for searching which standards languages / notations are applied in literature to graphically represent health care processes (see chapter 1). We were looking for standardized notations or languages (reported in chapter 2) to use in the representation of a guideline (in chapter 3 a case study is reported). The last step was to evaluate the readability and comprehensibility of the graphical representation by submitting to the project partners a questionnaire (results are presented in chapter 4).