The Role of Modeling in Clinical Information System Development Life Cycle
Mor Peleg · Methods of Information in Medicine · 2011
A model is an abstraction of some thing (e.g., object, system, process, phenomenon) in our world that we create in order to understand it better. Models can be physical (e.g., an architectural model of a building, a prototype of a user interface), mathematical (e.g., a model for predicting the weather, for estimating population growth), or conceptual (e.g., a clinical algorithm, the logical relationships between data items in an EMR). Models can be used to describe an existing complex real-world object or phenomenon, or they can be used as a vehicle to design a manmade object or system. While conceptual models can also be specified in narrative, in this discussion we address conceptual models that have a symbolic representation with a diagrammatic notation. Thus, conceptual models specify objects or processes, their properties, and their relationships.