Formal Verification of Health Assessment Tools: a Case Study

Health assessment tools (treatment standardization guidelines, risk evaluation scales, disease burden estimations, and patient's perceptions questionnaires, among others) are very similar in format to a software specification, although targeted to humans. As in any document written in natural language, such medical approaches are prone to errors and misunderstandings caused by ambiguities, omissions, or inconsistencies thus reducing the applicability and efficacy of these tools. The verification of health assessment tools is an important step for standardization but it is still a manual and ad-hoc process in the medical community. This work proposes the use of a formal approach for the verification of health assessment tools. We apply and evaluate a methodology originally proposed for the verification of Use Cases to a specific medical standardization guideline. Preliminary results show that formal verification of these medical artifacts can be a cost-effective mechanism to validate and qualify health approaches.