Acadela A Domain-Specific Language for Modeling Clinical Pathways

e-Health systems leverage clinical pathways (CPs) models as standardized and optimized procedures to execute and manage medical treatments. To model CPs in decision support e-Health systems, our study develops Acadela, a low-tech-oriented, text-based Domain Specific Language (DSL) with visualization capability. Acadela declares grammar to enforce textual syntax for modeling workflow, control flow, responsibility, medical data visualization, and communications with external systems. Furthermore, Acadela provides a model visualization to preview the CP and assist communication between medical and technical experts. To explore the DSL’s expressiveness and usability, we conducted two separate descriptive user studies with six medical professionals and eight technical adepts. First, we modeled five CPs used by medical professionals in their daily routines. Through semi-structured interviews, we collected feedback regarding the language’s expressiveness. Next, we invited the technical adepts to model a hypertension CP and debug a faulty model written in Acadela. Overall, the medical experts consider the modeled CPs accurately reflect their treatment procedure; and the technical adepts consider the language easy to use and applicable to model CPs. The results imply the DSL’s potential to model CPs with various degrees of complexity in different medical fields while being user-friendly to modelers.

Citation:

Huynh, T.; Erdem, S.; Eckert, F. and Matthes, F. (2023). Acadela: A Domain-Specific Language for Modeling Clinical Pathways.  In Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Software Technologies, ISBN 978-989-758-665-1, ISSN 2184-2833, pages 46-58.