A Practical Medical Experience of successfully mixing Model-Driven Paradigm and Business Process Management principles

The Model-Driven Paradigm has been successfully used in several different software contexts and there are a lot of literature offering approaches, techniques and tools to guarantee its application in different areas, such as software design, software testing, and so on. But, this paradigm can be also used in other contexts offering very good results. In this paper, we illustrate the power of using models and transformations to make an effective and efficient management of clinical guides in medical environments. The paper shows how using business process management to represent clinical guidelines, principles of Model-Driven paradigm can be successfully used. The paper presents the experiences in the IDE4ICDS, which is framed into the medical context to provide a solution to manage the life cycle of clinical guidelines. This project presents a methodology that allows the management of clinical guidelines to be automated, as well as a software platform to support it. This platform has been validated with health professionals from the Hospital Virgen del Rocio (Seville), obtaining promising results. Nowadays, this platform is been validated by healthcare professionals of Primary Care with patients suffering from Diabetes Mellitus Type 2.