Generating Log Requirements for Checking Conformance against Healthcare Standards using Workflow Modelling

Abstract

The healthcare industry establishes policies and standards to improve the quality of health processes and their delivery. Auditing and monitoring can be used to measure the quality of healthcare and check compliance with the health policies. Appropriate logging mechanisms can be considered as a key component to manage compliance initiatives because they can be used to monitor and audit low performance, malfunctions and unauthorised user activities. However, existing Health Information Systems (HISs) inadequately implement logging mechanisms, making it crucial to be improved for policy compliance. Identification of sufficient logging requirements is one of the major challenges faced by HIS developers. We present a step-wise workflow modelling approach to help identify logging requirements that can facilitate proper auditing against established typical patient journeys and documented healthcare policies and standards. As a case study we develop a healthcare event log file containing sufficient log details which has been merged from different hosts in a HIS in order to gather necessary log details to audit for policy compliance.