PRESTIGE is a project for applying telematics to assist the dissemination and application of clinical practice guidelines and protocols. Previous publications have described PRESTIGE's technical approach, including the use of a generic model for representing the knowledge content of clinical guidelines. This approach offers the possibility of ‘plug-and-play’ electronic distribution of clinical guidelines produced by multiple authoring bodies for use on multiple healthcare clinical management software platforms. A recent joint workshop held with the Section on Medical Informatics, Stanford University School of Medicine compared the European consensus approach developed in PRESTIGE with a parallel series of projects for computer-assisted protocol-based healthcare undertaken at Stanford and other American centres over the past, which confirmed the convergence and complementarity of our approaches, and holds out prospects of world-wide standardization in healthcare protocol knowledge representation. This paper summarises PRESTIGE conceptual model set which is the design of the project's approach.