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The Hck Laboratory is the place where I can keep track of my talks, projects and personal research. My name is Paolo Ciccarese, Master of Science in Software Engineering and PhD in Bioengineering and Bioinformatics. I am particularly interested in knowledge management methods and tools, in social network analysis and in building innovative medical informations systems. This website It is mainly directed to research domains strongly connected with some real applicative knowledge-intensive areas like medical informatics, bioengineering and genomics.
In the recent past I conducted research studies on design and implementation of knowledge management systems in real clinical organizations. This includes studies on electronic patient record and workflow management systems. I mainly focused on the design and development of decision support systems based on clinical practice guidelines. I designed a complete architectural framework called “Guide project”, a proposal for an innovative healthcare information system able to organize medical and organizational aspects through the separation of concerns paradigm. Such a paradigm is not only a software engineering paradigm, it is a general approach that can be applied to human resources indicating that each individual exhibits different concerns that are normally associated with his/her skills, attitude or past experience. Moreover, it can be observed that grouping people with common skills in different working teams increases productivity and reduces management costs, but only if the teams’ activities do not overlap and have clear "contracts" that define their concerns and their interoperability.
Guide is organized in a way to keep separated the three aspects of a health information system: Electronic Patient Record, Medical Decision Support and Organizational Model. These three concerns are communicating in the platform through messages formatted according to a set of contracts and exchanged through web services technology. Separated concerns and organisation-specific contracts make this architecture very flexible and more or less complex deployments can be arranged for the different settings, according to their needs and resources. Moreover, the Guide framework is designed to allow users formalizing their specific knowledge, keeping the common ground as limited as possible (common ground is the shared knowledge needed by the users in order to interact with the system). The system supports management of data, information and formalized knowledge, and in particular I explored an effective way to support medical knowledge elicitation, formalization and usage. The Guideline Management System addresses the whole life cycle of computerized Clinical Practice Guidelines. Guideline Management System components are organized in a distributed architecture: an editor to translate textual guidelines into a formal representation (the representation is flow-chart like and basically adopts the Petri-nets patterns), a repository to store and publish them, an enactment system to implement guidelines instances (i.e. a patient case) in a multi-user environment, and a reporting system able to completely trace any individual physician guideline-based decision action. The repository is organized in different levels that can be international, national, regional, down to the specific health care organization, according to the healthcare delivery policy. Health care organizations can download Clinical Practice Guidelines from the repository, adapt and introduce them in clinical practice.
Such platform has been integrated in the Trentino county (Italy) for heart-failure management and new application are under development for the Italian network of amyloidosis and for Lombardia county (Italy) oncological network managing the treatment of several oncological diseases.
In the recent past, I gave several lectures for the University of Pavia (Italy) courses of:
