OzCare: a workflow automation system for care plans.

An automated environment for implementing and monitoring care plans and practice guidelines is very important to the reduction of hospital costs and optimization of medical care. The goal of our research effort is to design a general system architecture that facilitates the implementation of (potentially) numerous care plans. Our approach is unique in that we apply the principles and technologies of Oz a multi-user collaborative workflow system that has been used as a software engineering environment framework, to hospital care planning. We utilize not only the workflow modeling and execution facilities of Oz, but also its open-system architecture to interface it with the World Wide Web, the Medical Logic Module server, and other components of the clinical information system. Our initial proof-of-concept system, OzCare, is constructed on top of the existing Oz system. Through several experiments in which we used this system to implement some Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center care plans, we demonstrated that our system is capable and flexible for care plan automation.