HIN (Health Issue Network). Petri net use in health sciences education

Abstract

There is an increasing social pressure to have medical students reach the end of their curriculum with a level of competency sufficient to face clinical practice already in the early phase of their careers. The case-based learning (CBL) is an efficient teaching method to prepare students for clinical practice through the use of real or realistic clinical cases. In this regard, the Electronic Healthcare Record (EHR) could be a good source of real patient stories to extract real cases for educational purposes. HIN (Health Issue Network) is introduced as novel approach to enhance CBL methodology for health sciences education, as well as innovative tool to query problem-oriented EHRs (POMRs). In this report HIN’s Petri Nets-based formalism as well as and the graphical formalism (f-HIN) for end users are described, for both the generic and the specific patient (for the latter di formalism changes into HINe and f-HINe). Some examples of HIN use to extract clinical case from EHR, as well as of exercises for medical students are eventually presented.