Process Programming to Support Medical Safety: A Case Study on Blood Transfusion

Medical errors are now recognized as a major cause of untimely deaths or other adverse medical outcomes. To reduce the number of medical errors, the Medical Safety Project at the University of Massachusetts is exploring using a process programming language to define medical processes, a requirements elicitation framework for specifying important medical properties, and finite-state verification tools to evaluate whether the process definitions adhere to these properties. In this paper, we describe our experiences to date. Although our findings are preliminary, we have found that defining and evaluating processes helps to detect weaknesses in these processes and leads to improved medical processes definitions.