Nursing Business Modeling with UML: From Time and Motion Study to Business Modeling

Abstract

A nurse is an autonomous, decentralized worker who recognizes goals, his or her environment, the conditions and actions of patients and other staff members, and determines his or her own actions. Put another way, the nurse makes decisions flexibly in the midst of uncertainty. Because of this, nursing work differs from individual nurse to nurse, and understanding this process theoretically is considered to be difficult. Concerning nursing work analysis, research has been done on task load (time required for tasks). However, there has been scant academic research on work processes in nursing compared with research that has accumulated in other industrial fields, including research on structuralizing work, i.e., defining and visualizing work processes. To improve work processes, it is necessary to understand and clarify work as a chain of theoretically related activities. Thus in this study, using time and motion study techniques, a method used to measure jobs, we clarify the structure of the work of transporting patients by nurses. We also attempt to visualize it. We use objected-oriented modeling to express the operation visually.