Sascha Müller

Data logistics as a means of integration in healthcare applications

Information integration is still a crucial issue in healthcare applications. Most clinical applications are determined by a huge variety of heterogeneous and independent work places, most of them equipped with specialized clinical hardware. Due to this it is almost impossible -- at least not feasible -- to run a common database system storing all relevant data of a clinical application. Nevertheless these clinical applications have to share their data. Our solution to this integration problem is to facilitate so called Process based Data Logistics. This approach is based on the integration capabilities of process management; however it does not coordinate the staff working in the healthcare domain in a restricting sense, but coordinates data sources and data sinks of these applications.

Process-Oriented Knowledge Support in a Clinical Research Setting

This paper presents a model driven development method that provides integral support for knowledge intensive processes in clinical applications. The method is based on process models, which are capable to support knowledge intensive processes. The necessary modeling artifacts are created and afterwards integrated in the deployed process modeling method, using our model driven development approach. These so called process associated knowledge rules allow for the context sensitive knowledge retrieval during process execution.

Integrated Process and Data Management for Healthcare Applications

Healthcare applications are demanding with respect to their IT needs. Due to their complexity they need strong IT support which must provide enough freedom to their users in the medical domain because of the high degree of flexibility required by them. We have chosen a process based technology, called data logistics, which can cope with these almost conflicting requirements. Data logistics is based on clinical processes. However, when data logistics processes are executed, this happens transparently to the users and provides them a huge degree of freedom in determining the sequence of process execution. In order to cope with these challenging features, the process execution environment for data logistics processes is generated according to our model driven development approach called process driven architecture (PDA). Several clinical studies illustrate the feasibility, effectiveness, and efficiency of the data logistics approach. This article both exposes the rationale of the data logistics approach and provides a deep inside into the implementation concepts.

Process Based Data Logistics: a Solution for Clinical Integration Problems

Integration is a big issue in healthcare environments. One aspect of integration is data logistics that supplies physicians with relevant patient data along treatment processes. The two main tasks facilitated by data logistics are data transportation and data transformation. To enable data transport, workflow management concepts are adopted for indirect process support to supply data. To enable data transformation, formats, ontologies and terminologies are considered in an XML based transformation approach. A case study regarding self tonometry illustrates this approach.

Building a generic platform for medical screening applications based on domain specific modeling and process orientation

The German health care system increasingly encounters an enormous cost pressure. Preventive medicine opens the possibility to avoid cost for the treatment of chronically sick persons and, especially, for the highly expensive hospitalization. Since with screenings, a special discipline of preventive medicine, a large number of persons are to be examined, information technology plays an important role to reduce cost and to increase treatment quality. We introduce a generic process based platform for distributed screenings for the early detection and diagnosis of the glaucoma disease. Thereby, glaucoma is merely one disease pattern which can be covered with the generic process based platform. Methods and concepts for the enactment of different screening processes and the integration of various modalities are in the center of our interest.