Using Healthcare Planning Features to Drive Scientific Workflows on the Web

Abstract

Automated healthcare planning (care-flow) systems are usually designed to afford the dynamicity of health environments, in which changes occur constantly as a patient's treatment progresses. This dynamic adaptation mechanism is based on blocks of activities, triggered and combined according to contextual data, producing a plan, which emerges from the interaction between these blocks and the context. However, tools that implement care-flow systems are still incipient, missing support for features like extensibility, collaboration and traceability of procedures. On the other hand, these features can be found in workflow systems that are widely used in a variety of environments (in business and scientific domains), with consolidated standards and technologies. However, workflow systems are not well suited to address the dynamicity of healthcare environments. In this paper we argue that care-flow and workflow systems have complementary characteristics and we present a software architecture that incorporates the emergent and context-driven approach of care-flow systems into workflow systems. We present a prototypical implementation validating the key concepts of our proposal, which uses an ontology representation of workflows combined with an ontology and SWRL rules.