A safety analysis approach to clinical workflows : application and evaluation

Gordon, Neil; Kabir, Sohag; Sharvia, Septavera; Walker, Martin; Al-Qora’n, Lamis

Abstract

Clinical workflows are safety critical workflows as they have the potential to cause harm or death to patients. Their safety needs to be considered as early as possible in the development process. Effective safety analysis methods are required to ensure the safety of these high-risk workflows, because errors that may happen through routine workflow could propagate within the workflow to result in harmful failures of the system’s output. This paper shows how to apply an approach for safety analysis of clinic al workflows to analyse the safety of the workflow within a radiology department and evaluates the approach in terms of usability and benefits. The outcomes of using this approach include identification of the root causes of hazardous workflow failures that may put patients’ lives at risk. We show that the approach is applicable to this area of healthcare and is able to present added value through the detailed information on possible failures, of both their causes and effects; therefore, it has the potential to improve the safety of radiology and other clinical workflows.

Citation

Gordon, N., Kabir, S., Sharvia, S., Walker, M., & Al-Qora’n, L. (in press). A safety analysis approach to clinical workflows : application and evaluation. International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications, 4(3), 82-91. https://doi.org/10.14569/SpecialIssue.2014.040310

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Feb 25, 2014
• Deposit Date: Sep 30, 2015
• Publicly Available Date: Nov 23, 2017
• Journal: International journal of advanced computer science and applications
• Print ISSN: 2156-5570
• Electronic ISSN: 2158-107X
• Publisher: SAI Organization
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 4
• Issue: 3
• Pages: 82-91
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.14569/SpecialIssue.2014.040310
• Keywords: Clinical workflows, Safety analysis, Radiology, HiP-HOPS
• Public URL: https://hull-repository.worktribe.com/output/379395
• Publisher URL: http://thesai.org/Publications/ViewPaper?Volume=4&Issue=3&Code=SpecialIssue&SerialNo=10
• Additional Information: Copy of article first published in: International journal of advanced computer science and applications, 2014, Special issue on extended papers from Science and Information Conference 2014