PIPAS

The PIPAS project aims at developing a (process) model-driven software to help defining, piloting and supervising multiple healthcare processes that could possibly interfere for a given patient, especially in the cancer domain.

Project objectives

The hospital world is facing increasing challenges regarding care quality, notably in the cancer domain, where patient suffering from multiples pathologies have to follow complex treatments. The modelling of clinical pathways is increasingly used to explicit the key steps of those treatments and contribute answering their inherent challenges.
In parallel, medical research is progressing by performing clinical studies to evaluate new treatments. Such studies rely on protocols precisely describing the steps of the treatments, hence driving hospital services to increasingly adopt process-oriented approaches. Clinical pathways and protocols are precisely two types of critical medical processes.

Process management systems provide IT support for this type of approach, which explains the growing interest they have been drawing from the medical field. However, current systems are still encoding rigid and purely imperative processes, and do not support the coordination of multiple, possibly interacting processes. As such, they constitute poor candidates for the coordination of medical processes.

In this context, the PIPAS project aims at developing a software that will enable:

• the definition of imperative and declarative models of multiple care processes. These models can be instantiate to a single patient and present static conflicts that have to be managed,
• the execution of models to pilot the care team members and manage dynamic conflicts occurring at runtime,
• the monitoring and evaluation of executing processes using performance indicators derived from the model,
• the exploitation of information during the process execution, using dashboards and specific views of the involved actors.

The software will also answer to non-functional requirements that will ensure its industrial interoperability with clinical systems, as well as its adaptability and usability.

Project results

At this point of the project, the consortium has identified various goal-driven modelling techniques for clinical pathways, while CETIC has developed Asteroid, a constraint-based local search (CBLS) framework, that will enable to build a workflow enactment engine with a pro-active resource management (patients, doctors, rooms, …). For more information, please go to the Asteroid website: https://forge.pallavi.be/projects/asteroid/.

Project Added-value for Businesses

The software developed in the PIPAS project will be reusable by medical software editors wishing to integrate the adaptative piloting of hospital processes and clinical pathways.

The underlying principles will also be reusable by hospital managing their IT infrastructure and support themselves, as well as by broader workflow management system editors.

Factsheet