Australian e-Government Technology Cluster Seminar

As has been widely reported in the news lately, healthcare errors are a major cause of death and suffering, and healthcare inefficiencies have high costs in both time and pain. In the University of Massachusetts Medical Safety Project, we are investigating if process definition and analysis technologies can be used to help reduce healthcare errors and increase healthcare efficiencies. Specifically, we are modeling healthcare processes with a process definition language and then  analyzing these processes using finite-state verification, fault-tree analysis, discrete event  simulation, and other analysis techniques. Working with the UMASS School of Nursing and the Baystate Medical Center, we are undertaking in-depth case studies on error-prone and lifecritical healthcare processes. In many ways, these processes are similar to complex, distributed systems with many interacting, concurrent threads and numerous exceptional conditions that must be carefully handled.

This talk describes the technologies we are using, discusses case studies, and presents our observations and findings to date. Although presented in terms of the healthcare domain, the described approach could be applied broadly to e-government, and to human-centric processes in other domains in order to provide a technology-driven approach to process improvement.

Presenters
Professors Osterweil and Clarke are Co-Directors of the Laboratory for Advanced Software Engineering Research (LASER) in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Professor Leon J. Osterweil is an internationally renowned researcher in the
areas of process modeling and process programs, analysis of concurrency, software architectures, e-commerce and e-government, medical processes and medical safety.

Professor Lori A. Clarke is a distinguished international researcher who has worked in the area of software engineering, particularly on software analysis and testing for many years.

Invitation (PDF)