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Using software engineering technology to improve the quality of medical processes

Published: 10 May 2008 Publication History

Abstract

In this paper, we describe some of the key observations resulting from our work on using software engineering technologies to help detect errors in medical processes. In many ways, medical processes are similar to distributed systems in their complexity and proneness to contain errors. We have been investigating the application of a continuous process improvement approach to medical processes in which detailed and semantically rich models of the medical processes are created and then subjected to rigorous analyses. The technologies we applied helped improve understanding about the processes and led to the detection of errors and subsequent improvements to those processes. This work is still preliminary, but is suggesting new research directions for medical process improvement, software engineering technologies, and the applicability of these technologies to other domains involving human-intensive processes.

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cover image ACM Conferences
ICSE Companion '08: Companion of the 30th international conference on Software engineering
May 2008
214 pages
ISBN:9781605580791
DOI:10.1145/1370175
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 10 May 2008

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Author Tags

  1. continuous process improvement
  2. medical processes
  3. process verification

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