EON

EON is an extensible architecture for developing decision-support tools for various aspects of protocol-based care. Initially developed to create systems for executing clinical trial protocols for the treatment of cancer and HIV infection¹, it has been extended for the management of chronic diseases and of other types of guidelines.

It is now in use in the Athena (Assessment and Treatment of Hypertension: Evidence-Based Automation) Decision Support System.

The architecture of a software system consists of the system’s constituent components and the application programming interfaces that relate them. An EON application may contain several classes of components:

1) a declarative guideline knowledge base that defines all clinical protocols and guidelines in terms of a general computer-interpretable guideline model and

2) problem-solving modules such as the EON Guideline Interpreter that generates patient-specific advisories based on encoded guidelines and protocols


3) the ChronusII temporal mediator that processes complex temporal queries over relational databases

4) client programs that access the services provided by problem-solving modules and by the ChronusII temporal mediator.