Workflows for burns care in Scotland

The Care for Burns in Scotland (COBIS) managed clinical network aims to provide a high standard of care for patients who suffer burn injuries in Scotland. In COBIS, an effort is made to maintain burns data throughout Scotland and develop efficiency and quality indicators for burns care. The difficulty of these tasks is compounded by patient diversity (different patients require different care pathways), the low quality of existing guidelines, the number of different people that can be involved with the same patient, and the occasional digression from standard protocols.

The aim of this project is to work towards a workflow based decision support system for burns care. This involves the breakdown of standard practices in collaboration with experts from the COBIS network. These will then be modelled as verified process workflows that clearly depict the step-by-step pathways that need to be followed.

An evaluation of workflow support systems for burns care will also be designed, based on a set of efficiency and policy compliance measures, and then applied to the modelled workflows.

The efforts focus towards a model of standard practices in addition to some decision making rules to account for patient diversity. The formalisation of such practices can have significant effects to the improvement of every day care, as well as to the further development of a more powerful decision support system that involves more complex technologies (ontologies, argumentation, etc) in the future.

This collaboration was initiated as an MSc project with Alisa Dewanti (2016).