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.