SHF: Small: Collaborative Research: Designing a Programming Language for Patient-Oriented Prescriptions

Northwestern University, Evanston IL

Investigators

Abstract

Title: SHF: Small: Collaborative Research: Designing a Programming Language for Patient-Oriented Prescriptions Medical errors in hospitals cause 2 to 4 million patient injuries and 440,000 deaths in US hospitals annually; this amounts to one-sixth of annual US deaths. Despite the expenditure of billions of dollars, computerization has failed to solve this problem. This failure can be attributed to a pervasive misunderstanding of the nature of healthcare prescriptions. This project conceptualizes prescriptions as programs and uses this essential insight to make significant progress in reducing medical error. The intellectual merits of this project include new insights regarding the building and maintenance of domain-specific languages and new general methods for developing high-reliability software that facilitates collaboration between machines and humans. The project's broader significance and importance is the development of powerful tools for improving the efficacy and safety of healthcare in the US. The main upshots are to give clinicians a public-domain, open-source framework for designing, creating, debugging, and tackling a broad array of prescriptions for managing medical problems; give researchers tools for acquiring data about the effect of healthcare interventions; and eventually to provide a simple, inexpensive means for conducting cohort studies, statistical process control trials, and randomized controlled trials. The project is designing and building the Patient-Oriented Prescription Programming Language (POP-PL) with the goal of using software engineering techniques to implement and maintain highly reliable electronic prescriptions. The research leads to new approaches to event-based programming, new type systems and analyses to find medical error, new debugging and iterative refinement techniques to improve reliability of prescriptions and programs generally, and new ways to conceptualize staged programming based on the staging that already occurs in medical care.