APPLYING EVENT-CONDITION-ACTION MECHANISM IN HEALTHCARE: A COMPUTERISED CLINICAL TEST-ORDERING PROTOCOL SYSTEM (TOPS)

This paper addresses issues of the active database application in the challenging healthcare area: the management and execution of computerised clinical practice guidelines/protocols. The problem of how to efficiently and effectively quey and manipulate the computerised clinical protocols/guidelines has posed a major challenge but received little research attention until very recently. By proposing a declarative modelling language (PLAN) with an Event-Condition-Action (ECA) mechanism for clinical test-ordering protocols, and an automatic mapping and management system (TOPS), this paper addresses this issue, in an important medical domain, from a unified approach based on an active rule mechanism. The work presented in this paper is part of an on-going research effort that investigates a new application domain for active databases, and proposes some new requirements towards the enhancements of active DBMS functionalitie