A Safety Analysis Approach to Clinical Workflows: Application and Evaluation

Abstract

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 clinical 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.

Technologies for Analyzing and Improving Healthcare Processes

“…Other modeling approaches that are more tailored to specialized fieldssuch as Matlab Simulink, which is intended for modeling systemscan also be adapted to model health processes, and thereby open up the opportunity to analyze and improve such systems by utilizing other tools (Al-Qoran et al 2014a).…”