Towards a Methodology and a Tool for Modeling Clinical Pathways

Abstract

Nowadays hospitals face the problem of increasing quality and at the same time reducing costs of their services. Clinical pathways approach has established itself as an effective method of reorganization of medical practice in a process-oriented way. Since more than a decade, clinical pathways are being created and applied in hospitals in the USA, Australia, and European countries. Traditional text-based approach for documenting clinical pathways does not allow automatic analysis and makes the maintenance of the models inefficient. Recently, researchers started to apply generic modeling languages, such as UML activity diagrams, EPC or BPMN, as well as domain specific process modeling languages, in order to formalize the representation of clinical pathways. However, none of these languages sufficiently covers the requirements of clinical pathway models, and the choice of a suitable modeling technique remains a problem. In this paper, we propose a modeling methodology and a modeling tool for creating graphical semantically annotated models of clinical pathways. We take into account the characteristics and usage scenarios of clinical pathways and show, how the proposed approach addresses these requirements.