Formal Modeling of Clinical Processes: Experiments in Oncology and Future Perspectives

摘要

Interest is growing throughout the world in the use of clinical guidelines as instruments for facilitating the spread of medical knowledge. In this paper we present the UML formalization of the breast cancer care process carried out in the S. Chiara Hospital in the context of the ONCOCURE project, which aims at developing a guideline-based decision support system embedded in a legacy patient management system.rnThe modeling of the oncological care process by means of UML has several advantages: it can facilitate the reconstruction of the patient clinical history, favor the production of sharable internal protocols readily available in the clinical routine and support the unambiguous communication of clinical processes between different professionals.