Monitoring hybrid process specifications with conflict management: An automata-theoretic approach

Area of Science:

• Health Informatics
• Computer Science
• Medical Informatics

Background:

• Medical treatments can be complex, involving multiple simultaneous conditions and drug allergies.
• Digitized clinical guidelines aid healthcare providers but combining them for complex cases is challenging.
• Existing research has limited focus on specifying and automatically combining multiple clinical guidelines for monitoring.

Purpose of the Study:

• To present algorithms for implementing a conceptual framework for monitoring combined clinical guidelines.
• To formalize a solution for managing the interplay of multiple, potentially conflicting, clinical guideline specifications.
• To provide early conflict detection and decision support in complex patient treatment scenarios.

Main Methods:

• Developed formal languages for representing clinical guideline specifications.
• Formalized a monitoring solution using data-aware Petri nets and temporal logic rules.
• Implemented a proof-of-concept and conducted extensive scalability experiments.

Main Results:

• The proposed solution seamlessly combines input process specifications.
• Achieved early conflict detection and decision support during process execution.
• Demonstrated the approach's effectiveness and scalability through implementation and experiments.

Conclusions:

• The presented algorithms enable effective monitoring and management of combined clinical guidelines.
• The solution addresses the practical challenge of incompatible treatment specifications in complex patient care.
• This work advances automated decision support and conflict resolution in healthcare.