Applying event-condition-action mechanism in healthcare: a computerised clinical test-ordering protocol system (TOPS)

The paper addresses issues of active database application in the challenging healthcare area: the management and execution of computerised clinical practice guidelines/protocols. The problem of how to efficiently and effectively query and manipulate the computerised clinical protocols/guidelines has posed a major challenge, but received little research attention until very recently. By proposing a declarative modeling language (PLAN) with an event-condition-action (ECA) mechanism for clinical test-ordering protocols, and an automatic mapping and management system (TOPS), the paper addresses this issue, in an important medical domain, from a unified approach based on an active rule mechanism. The work presented is part of an on-going research effort that investigates a new application domain for active databases, and proposes some new requirements towards the enhancements of active DBMS functionalities.