Digital Thread in Biomedical and Healthcare

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Challenges

Healthcare, in the US and globally, faces a challenge: how to offer a broader range of preventative, diagnostic and therapeutic services to a greater number of consumers without a proportionate increase in cost or decline in quality. As healthcare costs in the US approach a fifth of the US GDP, it makes sense to apply the best technical innovations to the issues.

The Role of MBSE

MBSE offers a number of powerful advantages in addressing the challenges of healthcare, a clear example of a system-of-systems. The human body is a complex system of systems in its own right, composed of multiple interacting subsystems. It is subject to a range of environmental factors, including the physical environment, lifestyle factors like work, diet and exercise, and contact with other humans and animals (the epidemiological environment). When a problem is recognized, the human body may also become subject to the medical care domain, what we often myopically think of as the healthcare system. Each of these systems is a separate discipline, studied by specialists with specialist tools. MBSE recognizes the connections between them as critical to understanding human health outcomes, a concept widely accepted, but infrequently put into practice.

How Intercax can help?

• Syndeia

Medical equipment design requires close coupling between system architecture, PLM and CAD. Development of systems dealing with electronic healthcare records requires the use of ALM and issue tracking tools. Syndeia provides model transforms, comparison, synchronization, and querying of data across all the diverse toolsets in the healthcare regime and even allows “models-of-models” to be created. Traceability across the models for audit and review speed up regulatory approval.

• • SysML Parametric Solvers

    Verification and validation of medical device designs to established medical product standard is a major need in the biomedcal equipment field. Our SysML parametric solvers (ParaMagic, Melody, Solvea, ParaSolver) can be used to perform mathematical analyses and trade studies for verifying medical device designs, or perform operational analyses of medical facilities, predicting usage, wait times, and drug store requirements.

• Services

  Intercax has helped train over 4000 new users in MBSE and SysML, with special emphasis on hands-on mastery of modeling and simulation. Organizations new to MBSE can benefit from Intercax’s training, consulting and custom development service in identifying and adopting best practices.

Resources

Intercax has published a series of five extended blog posts in the area recently, addressing a range of problems, including designing a medical infusion pump, evaluating chemotherapy facility usage, and debugging an electronic healthcare records system. These blog posts and associated model are listed below.

Access the Technote and SysML models here.

Blog Posts:

• Applications of MBE for Healthcare – Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5