LEMMA: A Language for Easy Medical Models Analysis

  • Authors:

  • Luciano Baresi;Fabrizio Consorti;Manuele Di Paola;Antonio Gargiulo;Mauro Pezzè

  • Affiliations:

  • Dipartimento di Elettronica e Informazione—Politecnico di Milano Piazza L. da Vinci 32, 20133 Milano, Italy;IV Semeiotica Chirurgica, Policlinico Umberto I—Università “La Sapienza” Piazzale A. Moro, 00161 Roma, Italy;IV Semeiotica Chirurgica, Policlinico Umberto I—Università “La Sapienza” Piazzale A. Moro, 00161 Roma, Italy;IV Semeiotica Chirurgica, Policlinico Umberto I—Università “La Sapienza” Piazzale A. Moro, 00161 Roma, Italy;Dipartimento di Elettronica e Informazione—Politecnico di Milano Piazza L. da Vinci 32, 20133 Milano, Italy

  • Venue:
  • CBMS'97 Proceedings of the 10th conference on Computer based medical systems
  • Year:
  • 1997

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Abstract

The quality of health care systems and processes is becoming a prominent problem and more and more efforts are devoted to define methodologies and tools to measure and assure quality of care. New methods are required to optimize health care processes to guarantee high quality standards within (limited) available resources. Resource optimizations able to preserve the quality of treatments require good models of medical processes. This paper presents LEMMA, a new notation to model medical processes. LEMMA provides physicians with intuitive graphical elements to design their models. At the same time a high level timed Petri net corresponding to the designed model is built automatically. In this way, LEMMA models are ascribed formal semantics and can be executed and analyzed automatically. The dual language approach followed in this paper allows physicians to gain all the benefits of formal methods without being proficient in them. Medical users manage simple graphical elements, while Petri nets ensure formality and validation capabilities. In this way LEMMA mixes formal and informal notations, overcoming the problems of both the approaches. The definition of the notation has been supported by the development of an environment to design LEMMA models. The environment, besides letting us experiment with the notation, has been employed to define and analyze real case studies.