Abstract
BACKGROUND: Clinical pathways (CPs) are usually expressed by means of workflow formalisms, providing health care personnel with an easy-to-understand, high-level conceptual model of medical steps in specific patient conditions, thereby improving overall health care process quality in clinical practice. From a standardized perspective, the business process model and notation (BPMN), a widely spread general-purpose process formalism, has been used for conceptual modeling in clinical domains, mainly because of its easy-to-use graphical notation, facilitating the common understanding and communication of the parties involved in health care. However, BPMN is not particularly oriented toward the peculiarities of complex clinical processes such as infection diagnosis and treatment, in which time plays a critical role, which is why much of the BPMN clinical-oriented research has revolved around how to extend the standard to address these special needs. The shift from an agnostic, general-purpose BPMN notation to a natively clinical-oriented notation such as openEHR Task Planning (TP) could constitute a major step toward clinical process improvement, enhancing the representation of CPs for infection treatment and other complex scenarios. OBJECTIVE: Our work aimed to analyze the suitability of a clinical-oriented formalism (TP) to successfully represent typical process patterns in infection treatment, identifying domain-specific improvements to the standard that could help enhance its modeling capabilities, thereby promoting the widespread adoption of CPs to improve medical practice and overall health care quality. METHODS: Our methodology consisted of 4 major steps: identification of key features of infection CPs through literature review, clinical guideline analysis, and BPMN extensions; analysis of the presence of key features in TP; modeling of relevant process patterns of catheter-related bloodstream infection as a case study; and analysis and proposal of extensions in view of the results. RESULTS: We were able to easily represent the same logic applied in the extended BPMN-based process models in our case study using out-of-the-box standard TP primitives. However, we identified possible improvements to the current version of TP to allow for simpler conceptual models of infection CPs and possibly of other complex clinical scenarios. CONCLUSIONS: Our study showed that the clinical-oriented TP specification is able to successfully represent the most complex catheter-related bloodstream infection process patterns depicted in our case study and identified possible extensions that can help increase its adequacy for modeling infection CPs and possibly other complex clinical conditions.