| WAIT ... Hole up... what have we here:
https://www.nccn.org/compendia-templates/compendia/nccn-comp... TLDR: The NCCN surely has a clean pretty database of these algorithms. They output these junky pdfs for free. Want cleaner "templates" data? Pay the toll please. What we have here is a walled garden. Want the treatment algorithm? Here muck through this huge disaster of 999 page pdfs. Oh you want the underlying data? Well, well, it's going to cost you. What we have here is not so much different than the paywalls of an academic journal. Some company running a core service to an altruistic industry and skimming a price. OP is just writing an algorithm to unskim it. And nobody can really use it without making the thing bulletproof lest a physician mistreat a cancer. To my sentiment this is yet another unethical topic in healthcare. These clunky algorithms, if a physician uses them, slows the process and introduces a potential source of error, ultimately harming patients. Harming patients for increased revenue. The physicians writing and maintaining the guidelines look the other way given they get a paycheck off it, plus the prestige of it all, similar to some scenarios in medicine itself. The natural thing to do is crack open the database and let algorithms utilize it. This whole thing of dumping data in an obstruse and machine-challenging format, then a rube goldberg machine to reverse the transformation, it's not right. Anyway I mention this because there seems to be a thought of "these pdfs are messy lets clean them" without looking at what's really going on here. |
NCCN Clinical Practice Guidelines in Oncology (NCCN Guidelines®): The NCCN Guidelines® document evidence-based, consensus-driven management to ensure that all patients receive preventive, diagnostic, treatment, and supportive services that are most likely to lead to optimal outcomes.
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