Medication Management Process Modeling using Coloured Petri nets

Medication errors are recognized as a major cause of patient safety. Physicians, pharmacists, and nurses need to a greater effort to reduce medication and medical errors. However, it is difficult to identify roles and responsibility through medication process and errors has still happened in a hospital. A major problem of medication process is an ambiguity and regulation violation. We propose a method to apply CPN (Coloured Petri nets) to a clinical setting to reduce errors and improve consensus. CPN have been used for modeling, simulation, and analysis for real-time systems. We use CPN for a medication management process, and present clinical scenarios to illustrate its application. The CPN model helps to detect weakness of the medication process and lead to improve the process through clarification. The CPN model has the potential to improve patient safety through improving understanding the clinical participants’ role and responsibility in medication processes.