Analyzing medical processes

This paper shows how software engineering technologies used to define and analyze complex software systems can also be effective in detecting defects in human-intensive processes used to administer healthcare. The work described here builds upon earlier work demonstrating that healthcare processes can be defined precisely. This paper describes how finite-state verification can be used to help find defects in such processes as well as find errors in the process definitions and property specifications. The paper includes a detailed example, based upon a real-world process for transfusing blood, where the process defects that were found led to improvements in the process.