Formally defining medical processes.

OBJECTIVES To demonstrate a technology-based approach to continuously improving the safety of medical processes. METHODS The paper describes the Little-JIL process definition language, originally developed to support software engineering, and shows how it can be used to model medical processes. The paper describes a Little-JIL model of a chemotherapy process and demonstrates how this model, and some process analysis technologies that are also briefly described, can be used to identify process defects that pose safety risks. RESULTS Rigorously modeling medical processes with Little-JIL and applying automated analysis techniques to those models helped identify process defects and vulnerabilities and led to improved processes that were reanalyzed to show that the original defects were no longer present. CONCLUSIONS Creating detailed and precisely defined models of medical processes that are then used as the basis for rigorous analyses can lead to improvements in the safety of these processes.