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About Software Engineering Technology for Improving Safety of Medical Processes

Medical errors are a major cause of death in industrial countries. This one-day course will begin by describing some of the past studies on medical errors and will then describe how software engineering process and analysis techniques can be applied to improve critical medical processes. A process modeling approach will be presented and examples will then be shown to indicate how the resulting process definitions can facilitate better understanding by medical professionals.

The course will describe how medical protocols can be represented as formal properties that can then be used as the basis for analysis of the process definitions. Finite-state verification, fault tree analysis, and simulations techniques will be presented that can be applied to the process definitions to detect vulnerabilities and property violations and to improve the medical processes. Examples will be drawn from critical medical processes.

The Audience: Medical professionals charged with improving safety and efficiency in medical care, and IT specialists wishing to understand challenges and opportunities in a critical and emerging new application domain. Although the medical domain will be the focus of this course, the software engineering technology described could be  used to reduce errors and improve processes for other domains as well.

Course Topics

• Introduction to past studies about medical errors: Overview of past studies; Process control to improve medical processes and reduce errors;
• Process modeling techniques applied to critical medical processes: Summary of approaches and their effective application in other disciplines;
• Elicitation techniques for defining processes: Capturing “real” processes: key challenges and approaches;
• Safety properties: Encoding medical guidelines and protocols requirements; Challenges and approaches to understanding and accurately representing medical requirements; Alternative specification approaches including informal descriptions to mathematically precise representations;
• Static analysis approaches for detecting faults in the process: Tracing through processes; Fault tree generation and analysis to find vulnerabilities; Using feedback;
• Simulation approaches: Opportunities and challenges;
• Lessons learned from case studies

For further information please contact:
Anne-Marie Eliseo
Industry Education Manager
phone: +61-8-8302-3928
email: industryeducation@nicta.com.au