The use of metamodel-based approach for designing healthcare applications

Recently, the use of Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) via metamodeling approach is gaining more attention for software applications development. The community from the healthcare domain also attempts to employ the metamodel approach for producing quality healthcare applications. Healthcare applications have become an imperative in every attempt to improve healthcare management. Numerous studies reported that the healthcare domain is seen as a complex and unique domain, which involves dynamic characteristics. In addition, it is widely recognized that the increase of information exchange in the healthcare domain is caused by the diversity of healthcare data. This has led to the increase use of information technologies in the healthcare industry so as to enhance the healthcare delivery process via healthcare applications. However, the complexity of healthcare information leads to ineffective models and design of healthcare applications. Modeling the healthcare processes and developing healthcare applications are challenging tasks. Hence, the advances of MDE have influenced the use of the metamodeling technique in the development of healthcare applications. Various metamodels are developed as a solution to provide a clear healthcare process model and a correct healthcare application. The aim of this paper is to analyse the use of the metamodel-based approach in designing healthcare applications. We believe that the metamodel-based approach would improve the development of healthcare applications