

The need to improve the quality of health care has led to a strong demand for clinical protocols and computer systems supporting both their creation and execution. We need to build complex protocols, but also to reason about them in different ways in order to verify, select, and modify protocols, to consider the effects of different protocols over time, and to monitor the patient's health conditions and the protocols' execution in parallel. Techniques, like Workflow Management Systems or Planning are appropriate to implement well-structured observations and processes, but are not suitable for the dynamically changing nature of therapy planning. Because of the limitations of existing approaches, we propose plan management consisting of fully integrated and inter-leaved tasks, namely plan design (authoring and/or generating), verification, validation, selection, adaptation, execution, monitoring, modification, evaluation, critiquing, and visualization. The Asgaard-Asbru project outlines task-specific problem-solving methods to support design, implementation, and execution of clinical protocols represented as time-oriented, skeletal plans. We illustrate how the idea of plan management is implemented in our Asgaard-Asbru project.