Model based Validation of XML Requirements, Applied on Healthcare IT Standards

Nonconformity of healthcare implementations to the medical standards has become a real source of troubles and loss of interoperability between systems. Healthcare documents frequently contain inconsistent requirements related to the standards they must conform to. Few standards and methodologies exist to deal with complex requirements, and often they are only dedicated to some specific kinds of healthcare standards, like CDA, HL7 and DICOM. The complexity of standards and their constant evolution have made difficult the implementation of robust check methods and tools for healthcare documents. In this paper, we propose a novel model-based validation methodology, which allows enumerating and validating requirements related to healthcare documents that have XML based structure. Model-based methodology defined and specified in this paper allows checking any kind of requirements even for healthcare documents with complex standards' cascading. Experimentations of model based checking demonstrate that this method was highly effective in detecting inconsistencies, and orienting implementers of healthcare technologies.