Integrating Safety Assessment into the Design of Healthcare Service-Oriented Architectures

Most healthcare organisations are service-oriented, fundamentally centred on critical services provided by medical and nursing staff. Increasingly, these human-centric services rely on softwareintensive systems, i.e. medical devices and health informatics, for improving different aspects of healthcare, e.g. enhancing efficiency through automation and patient safety through smart alarm systems. However, many healthcare services are categorised as high risk and as such it is vital to analyse the ways in which the software-based systems can contribute to unintentional harm and potentially compromise patient safety. This paper proposes an approach to modelling and analysing Service-Oriented Architectures (SOAs) used in healthcare, with emphasis on identifying and classifying potential hazardous behaviour. The paper also considers how the safety case for these SOAs can be developed in a modular manner. The approach is illustrated through a case study based on three services: ambulance, electronic health records and childbirth services. 1998 ACM Subject Classification K.4.1 [Public Policy Issues]: Computer-related health issues