Model and Integrate Medical Resource Availability into Verifiably Correct Executable Medical Guidelines - Technical Report
This work addresses safety issues in medical cyber-physical systems for patients, but it is incremental as it builds on existing guideline models by adding resource availability considerations.
The paper tackles the problem of ensuring patient safety in computerized medical guidelines by modeling and integrating medical resource availability, which is often assumed to be always available in existing models. It presents an approach that requires minimal changes to existing models and demonstrates its effectiveness through a simplified stroke case study.
Improving effectiveness and safety of patient care is an ultimate objective for medical cyber-physical systems. A recent study shows that the patients' death rate can be reduced by computerizing medical guidelines. Most existing medical guideline models are validated and/or verified based on the assumption that all necessary medical resources needed for a patient care are always available. However, the reality is that some medical resources, such as special medical equipment or medical specialists, can be temporarily unavailable for an individual patient. In such cases, safety properties validated and/or verified in existing medical guideline models without considering medical resource availability may not hold any more. The paper argues that considering medical resource availability is essential in building verifiably correct executable medical guidelines. We present an approach to explicitly and separately model medical resource availability and automatically integrate resource availability models into an existing statechart-based computerized medical guideline model. This approach requires minimal change in existing medical guideline models to take into consideration of medical resource availability in validating and verifying medical guideline models. A simplified stroke scenario is used as a case study to investigate the effectiveness and validity of our approach.