Pattern-Based Statechart Modeling Approach for Medical Best Practice Guidelines - A Case Study

Improving effectiveness and safety of patient care is an ultimate objective for medical cyber-physical systems. Many medical best practice guidelines exist in the format of hospital handbooks which are often lengthy and difficult for medical staff to remember and apply clinically. Statechart is an effective tool to model medical guidelines and enables clinical validation with medical staffs. However, some advanced statechart elements could result in high cost, such as low understandability, high difficulty in clinical validation, formal verification, and failure trace back. The paper presents a pattern-based statechart modeling approach for medical best practice guidelines, i.e., model medical guidelines with basic statechart elements and model patterns which are built upon these basic elements. For practical use, we implement the proposed approach based on open-source Yakindu statecharts. We also use a simplified cardiac arrest scenario provided to our team by Carle Foundation Hospital as a case study to validate the proposed approach.