HEAT: A tool to develop, analyze and monitor clinical pathways

Abstract

HEAT (Healthcare Efficiency and Effectiveness Analysis Tool) is a software application developed to support designing and analysis processes of the clinical pathways. It was developed in collaboration with the Hospital “Lozano Blesa” in Zaragoza, and is composed by two different tools. The first one, called HEAT-Scenario Designer, can be used to: (a) design new clinical scenarios, (b) check the correct use of resources and (c) check the correct communication strategies between several clinical pathways. To model clinical pathways, HEAT uses a domain specific modeling language (DSML), called Healthcare System Specification (HSS), being defined as an Unified Modeling Language (UML) profile. This language lets the medical personnel to describe the system without any knowledge of UML or other mathematical theory. Then, the tool can be used to transform the clinical pathways to Stochastic Well-formed Nets (SWN), a formal model that can be used latter for analysis by using available packages. The second tool of HEAT, called HEAT-Patients Monitor can be used to monitor the flow of patients that follow the modeled clinical pathways inside the hospital, providing to the medical doctors useful information about the behavior of the clinical pathways.