Skip to main content

Process Programming to Support Medical Safety: A Case Study on Blood Transfusion

  • Conference paper
Unifying the Software Process Spectrum (SPW 2005)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 3840))

Included in the following conference series:

Abstract

Medical errors are now recognized as a major cause of untimely deathsor other adverse medical outcomes. To reduce the number of medical errors, the Medical Safety Project at the University of Massachusetts is exploring using a process programming language to define medical processes, a requirements elicitation framework for specifying important medical properties, and finite-state verification tools to evaluate whether the process definitions adhere to these properties. In this paper, we describe our experiences to date. Although our findings are preliminary, we have found that defining and evaluating processes helps to detect weaknesses in these processes and leads to improved medical processes definitions.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 39.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

References

  1. Cheung, S.C., Giannakopoulou, D., Kramer, J.: Verification of liveness properties using compositional reachability analysis. In: Sixth European Software Engineering Conference and Fifth ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering, Zurich, Switzerland, pp. 227–243 (1997)

    Google Scholar 

  2. Cobleigh, J.M., Clarke, L.A., Osterweil, L.J.: Verifying properties of process definitions. In: ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis, Portland, OR, pp. 96–101 (2000)

    Google Scholar 

  3. Corbett, J.C., Dwyer, M.B., Hatcliff, J.: Robby: Bandera: A source-level interface for model checking Java programs. In: 22nd International Conference on Software Engineering, Limerick, Ireland, pp. 762–765 (2000)

    Google Scholar 

  4. Dwyer, M.B., Clarke, L.A., Cobleigh, J.M., Naumovich, G.: Flow analysis for verifying properties of concurrent software systems. ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology 14(3), 359–430 (2004)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  5. Holzmann, G.J.: The model checker SPIN. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering 23(5), 279–294 (1997)

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  6. Institute of Medicine: Crossing the Quality Chasm: A New Health System for the 21st Century, pp. 23–38. The National Academies Press, Washington DC (2001)

    Google Scholar 

  7. Kohn, L.T., Corrigan, J.M., Donaldson, M.S. (eds.): To Err is Human: Building a Safer Health System. National Academy Press, Washington DC (1999)

    Google Scholar 

  8. Lerner, B.S.: Verifying process models built using parameterized state machines. In: ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis, Boston, MA, pp. 274–284 (2004)

    Google Scholar 

  9. Magee, J., Kramer, J.: Concurrency: State Models & Java Programs. John Wiley & Sons, Chichester (1999)

    MATH  Google Scholar 

  10. Smith, R.L., Avrunin, G.S., Clarke, L.A., Osterweil, L.J.: PROPEL: An approach supporting property elucidation. In: 24th International Conference on Software Engineering, Orlando, FL, pp. 11–21 (2002)

    Google Scholar 

  11. Wise, A.: Little-JIL 1.0 language report. Technical report (UM-CS-1998-024), Department of Computer Science, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA (1998)

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2006 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

About this paper

Cite this paper

Clarke, L.A. et al. (2006). Process Programming to Support Medical Safety: A Case Study on Blood Transfusion. In: Li, M., Boehm, B., Osterweil, L.J. (eds) Unifying the Software Process Spectrum. SPW 2005. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 3840. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11608035_29

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11608035_29

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-31112-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-32450-8

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics