Towards an Effective Solution for Medical Treatment Process based on Product Lifecycle Management

Medical sector is one of the important domains in current society. This paper focuses on the patient treatment processes, in case of requiring prosthesis implantation. The specificity of such a process is that it makes connections between two lifecycles belonging to medical and engineering domains respectively. This implies several collaborative actions between stakeholders from heterogeneous disciplines. However, several problems of communication and knowledge sharing may occur because of the variety of semantic used and the specific business practices in each domain. In this context, this paper is interested in the potential of knowledge engineering and product lifecycle management approaches to cope with the above problems. To do so, a conceptual framework is proposed for the analysis of links between the disease (medical domain) and the prosthesis (engineering domain) lifecycles. Based on this analysis, a combined KM-PLM based approach is proposed. The application of the proposition is demonstrated through an implementation of useful function in the AUDROS PLM software.