Modelling temporal, data-centric medical processes

Abstract

Workflow technology has emerged as one of the leading technologies in modeling, redesigning, and executing medical processes and some interesting workflow management systems are available. Nevertheless, such systems are lacking in an effective management of two key aspects: data dependencies and temporal constraints. In clinical/health context these two aspects are of paramount importance. For example, a surgery intervention could need the results of the concurrent bioptic analysis to be properly concluded; on the other hand, to successfully apply a fibrinolytic therapy to patients with ST-segment Elevation Myocardial Infarction (STEMI) a maximum delay of 30 minutes must be considered w.r.t. the emergency department admission. In this paper, we propose TNest, a new advanced, structured and highly modular workflow modeling language that allows one to easily express data dependencies and time constraints during process design. All the features of TNest have been considered to model the process related to classical clinical guidelines, i.e. those for the management of STEMI patients, published by the American College of Cardiology/American Heart Association.