Safety has been a monumentally important issue in the medical field.
Preventable medical errors in hospitals are estimated to cause the death of over 98,000
patients a year. Typical errors include miscommunication between medical
professionals, incorrect drug administration, miscalculated drug doses, and many other
minor yet life threatening mistakes. One of the reasons that such mistakes occur is that
medical processes are complex and have many stages that require the collaboration and
coordination of several professionals and departments. This kind of complexity often
leaves processes insufficiently defined, so participants are unsure how or what needs to
be done in unusual situations or make mistaken assumptions about the behavior of other
participants.
The overall goal of the project was to enhance the safety and efficiency of complex
medical processes by applying new methods developed in software engineering. These
techniques support formalizing the process definitions and using verification techniques
to check them for possible errors.
My thesis work in the Laboratory for Advanced Software Engineering Research
(LASER) concentrated around the use of Little-JIL, an agent coordination language,
to continue the modeling and analysis of a real-world medical process: the Adult
Outpatient Chemotherapy Process that is being performed at the Baystate Hospital's
D'Amour Cancer Center. I concentrated my efforts around defining the process itself,
applicable medical terminology, participating agents, the resources that are required,
artifacts (such as medical charts) that are created and used, the non-normative
behaviors that must be accommodated and the safety properties that must all be
maintained.
In this thesis I describe the process and the methodology I used to elicit it, along
with findings indicating that defining and evaluating the process helps in identifying
weaknesses in it, thus leading to an improved medical process and greater patient
safety.
