It is by now widely accepted that medical guidelines can help to significantly improve the quality of medical care. Unfortunately,
constructing the required medical guidelines is a very labour intensive and costly process. The cost of guideline construction
would decrease if guidelines could be built from a set of building blocks that can be reused across guidelines. Such reusable
building blocks would also result in more standardised guidelines, facilitating their deployment. The goal of this paper is
to identify a collection of patterns that can be used as guideline building blocks. We propose two different methods for finding
such patterns We compare the collections of patterns obtained through these two methods, and experimentally validate some
of the patterns by checking their usability in the actual modelling of a medical guideline for breastcancer treatment.
This work has been supported by the European Commission’s IST program, under contract number IST-FP6-508794 Protocure-II.