Software Engineering in Health Care 2009
Yesterday I was lucky enough to be invited to give the opening Keynote for the Software Engineering in Health Care Workshop at ICSE 2009 and spend the whole day with a very thoughtful group of software engineers from around the world as we discussed issues related to designing software for healthcare. It was a very refreshing conversation with a slightly different perspective from the group. Some interesting activities and good people.
One of the topics that came back through the day was the issue of leveraging the context of data. This seemed to resonate in our discussions as a way to enhance current systems in new ways. The challenge is to define what those context could be and how they would support activities. The 5 W’s and 1 H are all important (who, what, when, where, why, and how). I’ve illustrated a few more specific elements in the diagram, but there are certainly more. Also important to consider which context we are talking about. So far, there are at least two distinct contexts that need to be considered:
- Point of Capture – where the datum was documented. The context of that point in time is obviously important.
- Point of (re)use – where the datum is being accessed. This might be future point of care activities, or it might be point of reflection activities (such as quality improvement or health planning, etc).
Model driven design and the overall socio-technical complexity of healthcare were also two additional resonating themes for me today. The challenge of the combination of these two (and our relative rates of failures of systems in healthcare in general) does lead one to look for new methodologies for system design and implementation. More explicit modeling of context into systems to provide more reusable information (as opposed to data) might be part of the answer.
A great workshop and I wished I could stay for the two days.
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