Reverse Engineering Activity Diagrams
Right now my research is focusing on creating activity diagrams to describe functionality of EMR systems. Specifically, I’m “reverse engineering” the activity diagrams from an already published list of EMR functional requirements. Several provinces have published EMR requirements as part of various RFPs over the past year. There appears to be overlap between a lot of them and I understand that is by design and re-using the standard set of requirements.
After spending some time coding a set of EMR requirements to see what format might make sense, it was clear that activity diagrams were a good choice. My reasons include:
- Content mapping confirmed that the published functional requirements covered most “processes” or “things,” which is as expected for functional requirements.
- The “things” were not well defined. That is it would be difficult to create a data model from the content within the functional requirements (some groups have defined data elements separately, which is a good start for interoperability).
- In my research, physicians will be reviewing activity diagrams. They are somewhat familiar with activity diagrams as they are similar enough to care flow decision trees. They won’t require a weekend course on how to read the diagrams to be able to interpret them.
- They are commonly used and part of the UML standard, so many requirements engineers will be familiar with them (good for future application)
- My learning curve is not as great and I can focus on content development.
Interestingly, how the requirements are written (see Saskatchewan Ministry of Government Services website – Competition Number 2462), have made swim lanes difficult to create the requirements do not typically specify which user can do what — see the example below from Saskatchewan.
The Solution should provide standard clinical tools that support clinical documentation and decision making and can be accessed when doing clinical notes.
e.g. Framingham risk calculator, BMI calculator automatically placed next to height and weight fields.
Other than the swim-lane issue; however, the development of activity diagrams is proving to be achievable. In fact, I think not having the swim-lanes will likely make it easier for doctors to review them as they are more like the flow diagrams we are used to in clinical practice diagrams. As you can see from this BC Asthma Guideline (pic below)
Once the diagrams are complete they will be validated and compared to a set of published text requirements to ensure that they contain equivalent information. Then the experiments begin!
We are going to compare physician comprehension and reasoning using requirements in diagram form with the published requirements in text form. We’ll be asking the physicians to validate the requirements and describe any gaps.
What we are hoping to find is that one method proves to be a clearly better way of getting feedback from physicians for requirements than the other. Which method does not matter as much as discovering if one way is more impactful than the other.
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