Should we develop a healthcare domain-specific language (DSL)?

March 10, 2006

Artima Developer recently started a discussion on How and When to Develop Domain-Specific Languages. It was a good discussion and made me think about a couple of DSLs I’d written for healthcare during my dot-com CTO days. I was wondering if others had done the same and whether they’d like to share their DSLs with the rest of the healthcare IT community.

  • Jennifer

    I’m really interested in the need for DSL’s in Healthcare. I’d love to hear of the ones you’ve written, their applicability and implementation details. I’d also love to hear of any areas in which DSL’s could be considered as useful or required.

  • Elaine

    I have recently been involved in a project to develop a DSL for Healthcare in the area of clinical decision support. The DSL allows the users (MDs, other clinicians) to write the rules in a more natural language than most of the rules engines support. Then our code translates the DSL rules into Drools syntax to be used for clinical decision support.

    Is there interest out there for this type of DSL in Healthcare?

  • http://shahid.shah.org Shahid N. Shah

    Sure, I’d love to take a look at what you’ve created. Sounds very interesting.

  • Melvin Perez-Cedano

    I’m very interested in learing your work on this topic.

    Thanks.

  • John Waldron

    I found a paper that describes a DSL that is implemented using aspects (AOP). I cannot find the full document – but here is the abstract on ACM:

    http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1255404

    ALPH: a domain-specific language for crosscutting pervasive healthcare concerns

    If anyone is interested, I’d be very interested in exploring healthcare DSLs in more depth.

  • Jenny Munnelly

    John- there is more detail on the language you saw in that paper available in a more recent publication “A Domain-Specific Language for Ubiquitous Healthcare” on IEEE:

    http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?isnumber=4783668&arnumber=4783710&count=98&index=41

    Contact me at any stage. I’d be very interested in your input and interest in the area.

  • http://www.metacase.com/blogs/jpt/blogView Juha-Pekka Tolvanen

    Sharing DSLs (language definitions) would be naturally great, but based on our experiences most companies who really get advantage from their languages do not want to publish them. And healthcare domain is not an exception as the same happens in other domains too (http://www.metacase.com/cases/dsm_examples.html).

  • http://viettelonline.com ADSL Viettel

    Hi, nice to meet you, my site provide DSL service, i hope you can get some information interesting in my site .

  • http://viettelonline.com ADSL Viettel

    Hi, nice to meet you, my site provide DSL service, i hope you can get some information interesting in my site .

  • ObjectSecurity

    Hi, we have a tool that can enforce technical security policies based on DSLs, and we are currently considering developing a healthcare DSL for a potential customer. Anyone who wants to discuss, please contact me via the contacts form at http://www.objectsecurity.com

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