On treatment patterns for modeling medical treatment processes in clinical practice guidelines

Clinical practice guidelines (CPGs) contain evidence-based and economically reasonable medical treatment processes. Executable medical treatment processes in healthcare information systems can assist the treatment processes. To this end, business process modeling technologies have been exploited to model medical treatment processes. However, medical treatment processes are usually flexible and knowledge-intensive. To reduce the effort in modeling, we summarize several treatment patterns (i.e., frequent behaviors in medical treatment processes in CPGs), and represent them by three process modeling languages (i.e., BPMN, DMN, and CMMN). Based on the summarized treatment patterns, we propose a pattern-based integrated framework for modeling medical treatment processes. A modeling platform is implemented to support the use of treatment patterns, by which the feasibility of our approach is validated. An empirical analysis is discussed based on the coverage rates of treatment patterns. Feedback from interviewed physicians in a Chinese hospital shows that executable medical treatment processes of CPGs provide a convenient way to obtain guidance, thus assisting daily work for medical workers.