An object-oriented model to support healthcare facility information management

Facility management within healthcare is required to ensure that complex systems are maintained and operational while causing minimum interruption to clinical activities and maintaining patient safety. Their tasks are complicated by fragmented and sometimes incomplete information. To help facility managers better manage lifecycle information pertinent to managing the facility and responding to facility related patient safety events, an object oriented product model is proposed in the context of developing a healthcare facility information management framework. The product model is developed as a result of various case analyses that were conducted using Unified Modeling Language (UML) Use Cases to examine information needs for existing healthcare facility maintenance operations. The resulting classification system and its uses to respond to patient safety events are discussed in this paper.