Design of a domain model for clinical engineering within the HL7 Reference Information Model

The Health Level 7 (HL7) Reference Information Model (RIM) was introduced as an object oriented information model to harmonize the definition of HL7 messages across different application domains. On the heels of HL7's successful version 2, the last version 3, including the RIM, which forms its centerpiece, has received significant attention, but it has in turn also been subjected to criticism, addressing important questions about the usability in specialist domains. The RIM defines `normative' classes such as Act, Role, Entity, etc. each of which is associated with a rich stock of attributes. When the RIM is applied to a new domain, one then needs to select and code these attributes. This paper reports the exploratory efforts that have been made to evaluate the feasibility of representing clinical engineering information in the HL7 RIM, with the purpose of developing a new HL7 v3 RIM based domain information model (DIM) dedicated to clinical engineering. This paper describes specifically the domain information analysis and the modeling phases of the proposed clinical engineering DIM development, using the Unified Modeling Language (UML). The proposed approach follows the reuse of standard healthcare information models for representation of clinical engineering information model, basing on the UML extensibility mechanisms and providing several advantages such us tooling support, graphical notation, exchangeability, extensibility, etc., which are also deployable in the next generation of HL7 tools.