Modelling in Clinical Practice with Web Services and BPEL

The aim of increasing the quality of health care has led to the development of a number of “guideline” systems whereby clinicians receive assistance in decision making in a given care context — for example in areas such as prescribing or therapeutics. These guidelines range in complexity and functionality from simple textual references through to executable modules which can subsume some of the clinical decision making process. In the latter case, ensuring consistent and interoperable engagement between the guideline engine, clinical information system and patient record can become problematic. Critical areas include vocabulary and terminology (in differing use contexts) and the interfaces and interaction between different sub-systems where traditional approaches have been focussed on tightly coupling of sub-systems and in the generation of special purpose “glue” languages and logic. In this paper, we briefly describe an approach to clinical, information and service modelling. This approach uses tools and techniques gaining increasing acceptance in the e-commerce domain, which shares many of the technical and interoperability problems present in e-health.