Modelling alarm management workflow in healthcare according to IHE framework by coloured Petri Nets

Ensuring patient safety inmedical device networks bymanaging alarms and related clinical data is a lifecritical issue. The Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE) initiative emerged to discuss and solve the interoperability and integration problems among medical information systems, vendors and users in order to improve patient care and healthcare system dependability. This paper models and analyzes the IHE Alarm Communication Management by using the Unified Modelling Language and Coloured Timed Petri nets. Aiming at generality, themodel does not refer to a specific healthcare context but it is based on a general scheme where the message transactions are integrated with the nurse responses. In order to show the potentialities of the model, a real case study is simulated and different scenarios with different levels of workload are analyzed. The results illustrate that the model is able to provide support for structured and comprehensive analysis of the healthcare system management. & 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.