Specification of business rules for the development of hospital alarm system: application to the pharmaceutical validation

Abstract

Although clinical alarm systems are part of the knowledge management setting within healthcare organisations, modelling of business processes related to decision support and knowledge representation of decision rules are seldom described. We propose a customization of the Unified Process that takes into account user requirements for clinical alarm systems by introducing the Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Business Rules (SBVR). This methodology was applied to the design and implementation of a clinical alarm system for pharmaceutical validation at the European Hospital Georges Pompidou (HEGP). Rules were implemented using the IlogJRules Business Rule Management System. We produced 3 business rules patterns and 427 instances of rules. As SBVR is close to natural language, pharmacists were able to understand rules and participate to their design.