Empirical Analysis of Knowledge Bases to Support Structured Output in the Arden Syntax

Background: Structured output has been suggested for the Arden Syntax to facilitate interoperability. Objective: Tabulate the components of WRITE statements in a corpus of medical logic modules (MLMs) in order to validate requiring structured output. Methods: WRITE statements were tabulated in 258 MLMs from 2 organizations. Results: In a total of 351 WRITE statements, email destinations (226) predominated, and 39 orders and 40 coded output elements also were tabulated. Free-text strings predominated as the message data. Conclusions: Arden WRITE statements contain considerable potentially structured data now included as free text. A future, normative structured WRITE statement must address a variety of data types and destinations.