A formal specification of electronic patient record processing for an integrated distributed health care system

Changing from paper to electronic media offers the potential to avoid inefficiencies as well as improving overall healthcare. The patient's record's confidentiality should not be compromised; and the right mapping of the patient to patient's medical records must be guaranteed. This makes a formal specification of any such electronic patient record essential to guarantee that there is no information loss (relative to existing systems) that could endanger patients. Current implementations of electronic patient record systems seem generally well-designed and organized but lack a formal specification of their underlying operations. These implementations have not been verified mathematically and therefore are relatively untrustworthy in the eyes of many practitioners. Since the healthcare domain is safety-critical, we should not rely on human intuition in the development of such systems. Thus, the goal of this research is to present a formal specification of an electronic patient record and how it interfaces to the software that uses it in an integrated distributed health care system. (Abstract shortened by UMI.).