An ontology-driven framework to support the dynamic formation of an interdisciplinary healthcare team.

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE:Teamwork has become a modus operandi in healthcare and delivery of patient care by an interdisciplinary healthcare team (IHT) is now a prevailing modality of care. We argue that a formal and automated support framework is needed for an IHT to properly leverage information technology resources. Such a framework should allow for patient preferences and expand a representation of a clinical workflow with a formal model of dynamic formation of a team, especially with regards to team leader- and membership, and the assignment of tasks to team members. Our goal was to develop such a support framework, present its prototype software implementation and verify the implementation using a proof-of-concept use case. Specifically, we focused on clinical workflows for in-patient tertiary care and on patient preferences with regards to selecting team members and team leaders. MATERIALS AND METHODS:Drawing on the research on clinical teamwork we defined the conceptual foundations for the proposed framework. Then, we designed its architecture and used ontology-driven design and first-order logic with associated reasoning methods to create and operationalize architectural elements. Finally, we incorporated existing solutions for business workflow modeling and execution as a backend for implementing the proposed framework. RESULTS:We developed a Team and Workflow Management Framework (TWMF) with semantic components that allow for formalizing and operationalizing team formation in in-patient tertiary care setting and support provider-related patient preferences. We also created a prototype software implementation of TWMF using the IBM Business Process Manager platform. This implementation was evaluated in several simulated patient scenarios. CONCLUSIONS:TWMF integrates existing workflow technologies and extends them with the capabilities to support dynamic formation of an IHT. Results of this research can be used to support real-time execution of clinical workflows, or to simulate their execution in order to assess the impact of various conditions (e.g., patterns of work shifts, staffing) on IHT operations.