| 147 | 148 | A key part of the investigation process shown in FIGURE 17, and indeed healthcare in general, is intervention. Specifying and managing interventions (whether the simplest prescriptions or complex surgery and therapy) is a hard problem for information systems because it is in "future time" (meaning that intervention activities have to be expressed using branching/looping time specifications, not the simple linear time of observations), unexpected events can change things (e.g. patient reaction to drugs), and the status of a given intervention can be hard to track, particularly in distributed systems. |
