Abstract
Motivation: Systems interoperability is a key challenge in providing continuity of care to all patients. The challenge is addressed with information standards and new approaches to systems integration based on service-oriented architectures. Model-driven development promise utilities that are suitable for software service development in the healthcare domain, but development tools are still immature and their industry uptake is low. The knowledge about how model-driven development tools can become more useful to the healthcare software developers should be strengthened. Approach: This paper presents the ModelHealth toolchain that was created in four design/assess cycles, involving 28 students and 41 professional developers in the period 2007–2010. The toolchain provides design assistance for creating software services based on concepts from the CEN-13940 standard for continuity of care, which facilitates development of interoperable software services. Results: The CEN-13940 standard was successfully incorporated into the ModelHealth Toolchain assisting developers in creating software service design models that adhered to the standard. The developers expressed that improved understanding of the target system, documentation generation, and artifact traceability were essential utilities of the model-driven approach. Conclusion: The paper concludes healthcare domain knowledge can be successfully incorporated in a model-driven development toolchain, providing valuable input to the healthcare software service design process. A set of recommendations on how to incorporate domain specific concepts into model-driven development tools is provided. To our knowledge, no other scientific publications have reported from healthcare specific model-driven tool design and evaluations. Our recommendations extend and nuance existing knowledge on model-driven development tooling in general.
