Characterization of the knowledge contained in diagnostic problem oriented clinical practice guidelines.

Several data types (symptoms, signs, and tests) are gathered and used in the process of investigating a clinical problem. In this study, we aimed to quantitatively evaluate how often the knowledge contained in clinical practice guidelines refer to these data types, and to what extent evidence based medicine principles are applied to them. To this end, we analyzed the knowledge contained in diagnostic problem-oriented guidelines using a set of relevant characteristics that we developed. We believe that the results of this study may be helpful for developers of clinical decision-support systems.