There is a notable lack of maturity of prospective hazard analysis methodology for safety-critical information systems (such as clinical information systems). Most methods in this area target only the user interface and are limited to usability studies. We have been researching hazard analysis methods to fill this important gap and defined the ISHA (Information System Hazard Analysis) method, based on earlier foundational work in safety engineering. Today, Fieran Mason-Blakely is presenting our paper at FHIES/SEHC 2014. In this paper, we apply ISHA to the EMR-to-EMR episodical document exchange (E2E) standard developed in British Columbia (which is currently under deployment). Check out our paper for details.
Category Archives: SE in Health Care
Hospital equipment vulnerable due to Software problems
When Scott Erven was given free rein to roam through all of the medical equipment used at a large chain of Midwest health care facilities, he knew he would find security problems–but he wasn’t prepared for just how bad it would be. [full story]
SEHC is not like SE[x]
There has been lots of reports about “badly engineered” software in health care. Clearly, the health care domain is complex, but is it really more complex than for example the airline industry (which also mostly runs on software by now – and with a very good track record)?
The Software Engineering (SE) research community has had a series of venues (conferences and workshops) targeted to “Software Engineering in Health Care” (SEHC). One of these venues has been co-located with the Intl. Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE) since 2008. This year, ICSE (and the SEHC workshop) is located in San Francisco. There is a common theme in all presentations on the morning of the first day, which tries to answer the question: Is SE in Health Care really substantially difference from SE in *x* (where x could be any other domain that software has been successful in).
Our lab has a paper at the workshop arguing that SEHC is indeed different from SE[x] and that we need to explicitly focus on knowledge translation in order to increase our impact.