System for Planning and Performing Staging of Medical Investigations for Diagnosis
Abstract The selection, planning and realization of medical examinations for pre-diagnosis are carried out by physicians over long drop-down lists. Tests which are unnecessary or need to be done in the next stages, cause significant costs for hospitals and affect the quality of the results. In this paper, we propose a system that transforms the established protocols for pre-diagnosis examinations into a personalized finite state machine and executes all steps in the protocol by interacting with patients, physicians and stakeholders with the physician’s start command. For the proposed system, a language has been created to identify precisely the pre-diagnosis protocols and stages. A has been created in order to retrieve protocol definitions from users and convert them to computer language. This interface allows a technically non-expert user to easily define protocols into the database by providing drag and drop graphical flow elements. The system performs the execution of the protocol by producing a Finite State Machine with a timeout and timing functions, which can produce outputs as well as the inputs for a given patient and selected protocol. Messages produced by the system for physicians, patients or stakeholders are sent as notifications via mobile devices. In this way, physicians can watch the execution of the protocols in real time, physicians are given valuable time, standardization and coordination are provided between physicians and hospitals, unnecessary examinations are excluded and necessary ones are included in the validation process. The unnecessary medical examinations are prevented and hospitals provides significant financial benefits. Also duration of the diagnosis is minimized by follow-up of the results.