MODELING MEDICAL TRIALS IN PHARMACOECONOMICS USING A TEMPORAL OBJECT MODEL

Time is an inherent feature of many medical applications. These applic ations can also benefit from the support of object database management systems which better capture the semantics of the complex objects tha t arise in the medical domain. In this paper, we present a uniform beh avioral temporal object model which includes a rich and extensible set of types and behaviors to support the various features of a medical a pplication. We concentrate here on the application of pharmacoeconomic medical trials. Pharmacoeconomics is a field of medical economics in which the costs and outcomes of alternative treatments are assessed an d compared, in order to establish which is the most appropriate treatm ent for a particular illness in a particular setting. We describe in d etail the histories and timelines features of our temporal model and s how how they can effectively be used to model a pharmacoeconomic trial . We then give an instance of a pharmacoeconomic trial as it would app ear in the temporal object model and show, using queries, how a series of different behaviors could be used to retrieve various components o f the instance. These components could then be used to assess the alte rnative treatments involved in the trial and determine their cost-effe ctiveness. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd.