Abstract: An active guidelines capability or component is linked to a computerized patient record system to integrate the use of clinical guidelines in the workflow of clinicians treating patients. Many healthcare entities maintain sets of clinical guidelines describing recommended treatment or analysis options for patients displaying sets of symptoms or for whom certain diagnoses have been made. The active guidelines feature adds an active guidelines tag to such clinical guidelines so that when the clinician accesses the clinical guidelines and wishes to follow the recommendation, the clinician merely has to click on a hypertext created from the tag which then transmits action orders, also contained in the tag, to be transmitted to the computerized patient record system for implementation. Patient data associated with the recommendations, such as relevant test or lab results, interaction or allergy information, or other current treatments, is also identified and displayed.