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International Workshop on Software Engineering in Health Care

International Symposium on Foundations of Health Informatics Engineering and Systems

SEHC 2014, FHIES 2014: Software Engineering in Health Care pp 145–161Cite as

Process Execution and Enactment in Medical Environments

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 9062))

Abstract

Process models are increasingly recognized as an important asset for higher-quality healthcare. They may be used for analyzing, documenting, and explaining complex medical processes to the stakeholders involved in the process. Models may also be used for driving single processes or for orchestrating multiple ones. Model-driven software technologies therefore appear promising. In particular, process enactment provides software-based support for executing operational processes. A wide variety of possible enactment schemes are available in medical environments, e.g., to maintain daily medical worklists, to issue warnings or reminders in specific process states, to schedule tasks competing for resources, to provide on-the-fly advice in case of staff unavailability, and so forth. Such variety of possible process enactments calls for a common conceptual framework for defining, comparing, classifying, and integrating them. The paper introduces such a framework and describes a number of patterns for process execution and enactment based on it. These patterns result from a simple generic, goal-oriented model of medical process execution aiming at clarifying the role of software within the process and its environment. The patterns are illustrated on two real, non-trivial case studies.

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Acknowledgement

We wish to thank P. Scalliet and M. Coevoet for providing us with details about their radiotherapy worklist software outlined in Sect. 5.1. Many thanks are also due to R. De Landtsheer, F. Roucoux, Y. Guyot, C. Ponsard and Y. Humblet for their collaboration in designing the scheduling engine in Sect. 5.2. This work was supported by the Regional Government of Wallonia (PIPAS project Nr. 1017087).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. ICTEAM Research Institute, Université catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium

    Bernard Lambeau, Christophe Damas & Axel van Lamsweerde

Authors
  1. Bernard Lambeau
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  2. Christophe Damas
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  3. Axel van Lamsweerde
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Correspondence to Bernard Lambeau .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. TU Clausthal, Clausthal-Zellerfeld, Germany

    Michaela Huhn

  2. North Carolina State University, Raleigh, North Carolina, USA

    Laurie Williams

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Lambeau, B., Damas, C., van Lamsweerde, A. (2017). Process Execution and Enactment in Medical Environments. In: Huhn, M., Williams, L. (eds) Software Engineering in Health Care. SEHC FHIES 2014 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9062. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63194-3_10

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63194-3_10

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-63193-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-63194-3

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