Toward a decision support system for the clinical pathways assessment

This paper presents a decision support system to be used in hospital management tasks which is based on the clinical pathways. We propose a very simple graphical modeling language based on a small number of primitive elements through which the medical doctors could introduce a clinical pathway for a specific disease. Three essential aspects related to a clinical pathway can be specified in this language: (1) patient flow; (2) resource utilization; and (3) information interchange. This high-level language is a domain specific modeling language called Healthcare System Specification (HSS), and it is defined as an Unified Modeling Language (UML) profile. A model to model transformation is also proposed in order to obtain, from the pathways HSS specification, a Stochastic Well-formed Net (SWN) model that enables a formal analysis of the modeled system and, if needed, to apply synthesis methods enforcing specified requirements. The transformation is based on the application of local rules. The clinical pathway of hip fracture from the “Lozano Blesa” University hospital in Zaragoza is taken as an example. Published as: S. Bernardi, C. Mahulea and J. Albareda, “Toward a decision support system for the clinical pathways assessment,” Discrete Event Dynamic Systems: Theory and Applications, 29(1):91–125, March 2019. DOI: 10.1007/s10626-019-00279-9. ∗Corresponding author is: Cristian Mahulea, Marı́a de Luna 1, 50018 Zaragoza, Spain, tel. + (34) 976 76 2517, Fax: + (34) 976761914, e-mail: {cmahulea@unizar.es}. This work has been partially supported by CICYT FEDER (Spain-EU) under Grant DPI2014-57252-R and by the Aragonese Government (Spain) under grant T94 DisCo group. The authors want to thank José Manuel Colom, co-author of the conference paper on which is based this manuscript, for all his help during the initial version. S. Bernardi and C. Mahulea are with Dept. of Computer Science and Systems Engineering, University of Zaragoza (Spain). J. Albareda is with Orthopedic Surgery Department, University Hospital “Lozano Blesa”, Zaragoza (Spain).

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